If you absolutely must keep using those proprietary formats, walk this way Just over six months on from version 7.3, LibreOffice 7.4 Community has arrived, boasting improvements in Microsoft Office compatibility.…  ( 5 min )

Trail from Super Orange HK Holding Ltd leads back to National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund The UK government has blocked the sale of a British chip design software outfit to a Chinese company, citing national security. The move is the latest step the government has taken in its increasingly defensive stance against foreign ownership of UK technology companies.…  ( 5 min )

Well now there's an idea In what may be a major shift, Google plans to revise its search algorithm to rank content crafted primarily for people rather than content designed to impress web crawlers and indexing bots.…  ( 5 min )

Long list of open standards contributions part of journey to REST-based GIS stack, companies say Database vendor MariaDB has forked out an undisclosed sum for CubeWerx, a geospatial data specialist, in the hope of making make these features easier to build into data-hungry applications.…  ( 4 min )

Not to mention the severely disadvantageous subscription model Something for the Weekend  I have an app whose sole purpose is to launch another app.…  ( 8 min )

Who knows where all those cables go anyway? On Call  Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's ongoing chronicle of IT incidents that readers have managed to survive, divert or diminish, while emerging with reputations intact.…  ( 4 min )

Privacy, it's a useful marketing term *Offer does not apply in China Apple has left a VPN bypass vulnerability in iOS unfixed for at least two years, leaving identifying IP traffic data exposed, and there's no sign of a fix.…  ( 5 min )

A350 saved from peril by sharp-eyed ground crew Australian wasps have once again brought a passenger aircraft to the brink of peril.…  ( 4 min )

'We're placing a high priority on it' NASA is pushing ahead to recruit a panel of experts and publish a much-awaited report on unidentified aerial phenomenons (UAPs), all with a budget of up to $100,000.…  ( 5 min )

Tech preview is Azure-only for now, adding to previous AWS Arm adventures Red Hat has delivered a tech preview of its OpenShift containerization platform that can drive clusters spanning both x86 and Arm silicon.…  ( 4 min )

Mandate goes into effect October 1, but industry players will have one year to comply Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications updated cybersecurity laws this week to mandate Big Tech and telecoms companies store user data locally and control that data with local entities.…  ( 4 min )

Don’t Panic if you run terabytes of RAM and need to understand a dumped snapshot Oracle's Solaris operating system remains widely used, even though Big Red more or less froze development of the product in 2018 save for regular Support Repository Updates (SRUs) that add minor updates and bug fixes.…  ( 4 min )

There's always a get-out clause An attempt by lawmakers to improve parts of the US government's cybersecurity defenses has raised questions – and hackles – among infosec professionals.…  ( 6 min )

Sure, it's pricey, but not using it would be more expensive, says drug maker A one-time gene therapy treatment recently approved by America's FDA is gaining attention not just for its clinical value, but for its price: at $2.8 million, Bluebird Bio's Zynteglo is the most expensive drug in US history.…  ( 5 min )

Over the course of the past year, multiple teams across the world have gone head to head to try and claim one of the 16 spots in the Valorant Champions Tour. This is the ultimate Valorant tournament, and will be kicking off on August 31, running until September 18. To celebrate the tourney and all those involved, Valorant is releasing a Champions 2022 bundle, a free event pass, and various Twitch and YouTube drops so that your average player need not miss out on any of the fun. First things first, the limited edition Champions 2022 bundle will no doubt go down a treat. The last Champions cosmetic we saw was for the Vandal and karambit, and it still remains one of the more popular picks among players because of it's exclusivity and slick look. This time around, we're being given a glossy Phantom that I have no doubt will be just as admired. Read more  ( 16 min )

My daughter has a favourite toy. It's a Squishmallow called Serene. Serene is a round-ish turquoise squirrel. If you're not into soft toys, you may not know how popular Squishmallows are, but to give you an idea... the last time I was in the local toy shop, every one of the four people in the queue to pay had hold of a Squishmallow. But the popularity of Squishmallows isn’t the point of this little story. Serene goes everywhere with my daughter and is her best friend - as much as a wannabe toddler can have a best friend. Given how Serene can sometimes be thrown from the buggy with the complete lack of foresight and comprehension of possible events that only a baby has, and the extreme love she has for her, we thought it best to buy a second Serene. "Let's buy a clone of Serene, a new one, just in case," I said to my wife while browsing the toy store and walking past the sizable Squishmallow display. Read more  ( 19 min )

In an announcement directly from Antonela Pounder, global community director for 505 Games, it has been revealed that Death Stranding will be arriving on PC Game Pass on August 23, 2022. You might recall that just a few days ago, PC Game Pass shared a small teaser to Twitter for a game they were adding. Immediately, many had their suspicions that the game could be Death Stranding. Now, we know they're completely correct. Death Stranding takes place in an apocalyptic United States. When an event known as 'Death Stranding' shakes earth to it's core, a bunch of Beached Things – strange, invisible monsters – start showing up. These BT's cause havoc, so much so that the remainder of humanity is in imminent danger, and it's up to Sam Porter Bridges to travel back and forth in a bid to save everyone from extinction. Read more  ( 16 min )

For some reason, the Diablo 4 developers are very keen to reiterate to people that the game will not be pay-to-win, and that players will not have to spend real money in order to bolster their characters and make meaningful in-game progress. In a new quarterly update released last night, Diablo 4‘s director of product, Kegan Clark, noted that any items that can be purchased for real money in the game's shop will impact gameplay. "Nothing offered in the Shop grants a direct or indirect gameplay advantage," says Clark. "So, while many of these may look like powerful pieces of gear, they have no in-game stats." Read more  ( 16 min )

No content preview  ( 6 min )

Paus-ryktet kanske bara var en fråga om utvecklarbyte.  ( 6 min )

FZ:s Johan Olander upptäcker att kalla kriget är stekhett, supersvårt och svinskoj.  ( 9 min )

Gibba gratis på Steam och pc-Game Pass.  ( 6 min )

Och Quake Champions och två GAMLA Elder Scrolls är gratis i MS Store.  ( 6 min )

Spoiler: Ett handlingsdrivet FPS i en öppen spelvärld för solo- eller gruppspelare.  ( 7 min )

Helgen är räddad?  ( 6 min )

Helgen är räddad?  ( 6 min )

Och som i Diablo III börjar man med en ny karaktär varje säsong.  ( 7 min )

Squanch Games behöver mer tid för sitt kommande spel.  ( 6 min )

Here is your daily dose of what the heck? YouTube and the mighty algorithm decided for no apparent reason, that my Steam Deck video was "harmful and dangerous".  ( 4 min )

As time goes on, more developers are tweaking their games to improve the Steam Deck experience and Witchtastic looks like a fun co-op game to try out.  ( 4 min )

Motion Twin / Evil Empire have announced that Dead Cells is increasing in price in Argentina & Turkey, as it seems too many people were taking advantage of the cheaper prices from other countries.  ( 4 min )

Love your superhero stuff? Keep an eye on Capes, an upcoming turn-based strategy RPG full of people with superpowers.  ( 4 min )

No content preview

Full 60+ game list also includes some Genesis classics with new gameplay features.  ( 7 min )

All signs point to notorious 20th-century forger.  ( 6 min )

Easily one of the best Chromebooks you can buy, but it could use a price drop.  ( 6 min )

"We are definitely seeing significant attrition. That should surprise no one."  ( 11 min )

Slime Rancher 2 will be making its way into early access via Xbox and PC on 22nd September. The sequel to 2017's Slime Rancher will continue the story of Beatrix LeBeau. This time, she will see her adventures take her across the Slime Sea to the mysterious shores of Rainbow Island. Here, she will find a multitude of "wiggly, new slimes to wrangle". You can check out a trailer for the upcoming game below. Read more  ( 15 min )

Bethesda has updated a blog post which previously suggested we might see more of Starfield next week at Gamescom. Fan excitment was sparked this week by word that Redfall and Starfield gameplay would be shown at a Community Get Together to be held next Friday, 26th August. "Come see Redfall and Starfield gameplay and get your hands on Fallout 76 while you're there," the blog teased. "Of course, we also have a few surprises and goodies in store for you." Read more  ( 15 min )

Cult of the Lamb has had an amazing debut. Massive Monster's indie title, which tasks players with starting their own cult "in a land of false prophets", has seen an impressive 1m sales across consoles as of yesterday. This is even more remarkable when you take into account that the game has only been out for a week. Read more  ( 15 min )

Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding will be added to Game Pass for PC next week, on Tuesday 23rd August at 1am UK time. Intriguingly, this appears to be the original version of the game, rather than its more recent Director's Cut. Published by 505 Games, the PC version of Death Stranding first arrived in July 2020, around eight months after it first popped up as a PlayStation 4 console exclusive. Read more  ( 15 min )

Nintendo Switch players will soon be able to get their hands on adorable sim Ooblets. The game is due to come to Nintendo's console on 1st September, following its stint in early access on PC (via Epic) and Xbox. "We've been working on Ooblets... for the past SIX years and it's finally reaching 1.0," the developer tweeted earlier this week, before unveiling the game's Switch debut. Read more  ( 15 min )

Gameplay footage of Hyenas, the next title from Sega studio Creative Assembly, has leaked on YouTube. Hyenas was announced in June and has since had three closed alphas. Anyone taking part in the alpha is required to sign an NDA. Yesterday, an hour of footage from the alpha was uploaded to YouTube. Read more  ( 15 min )

Earlier this month, it was reported that Sony had been blocking games from going onto Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription service. The type of games this was affecting was never specified, however screenwriter Gary Whitta recently claimed that Sony had paid Cult of the Lamb's developer, Massive Monster, to stop the indie-hit from appearing on Xbox's service. The game's publisher Devolver Digital has now rebuked Whitta's statement. Read more  ( 15 min )

Diablo 4 developer Blizzard has issued a lengthy blog post describing the kinds of things you'll be able to spend money on in its upcoming dungeon crawler - and things you won't. It's the latest round of reassurance from Blizzard on Diablo 4 following the controversial monetisation of its recent free-to-play spin-off Diablo Immortal, in which players have argued you can pay extortionate amounts and become more powerful. By contrast, Diablo 4 will feature a cosmetics shop and season pass - "none of which provide any pay-for-power options", Diablo 4 product director Kegan Clark said. Read more  ( 15 min )

I can still remember my first game of PUBG. Well, kind of. I can't remember how I did out there on the battlefield, which weapons I found or how far I traveled across the map. But I can remember that starter island - where everyone spawns while the game is gathering players. I remember just being really confused by it. Where was I? Was this it? Were we off and playing? Did I need to be doing something? There were weapons scattered around - should I be using them? There were people everywhere. Should I be hiding? I am familiar with the starting island now - in fact I love it. I spend a lot of time in games that use starting islands, from Fortnite to Among Us (not really an island, that one, but you know what I mean). Read more  ( 17 min )

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: eternal war, cults, and a game that invokes Hungy Hungry Hippos. If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive. Yes, it's on brand for me. Yes, it's a free-to-download mobile game with microtransactions. And yes, it's unnecessarily bloated, with more resources to collect and progression gates to grind through that even the Emperor himself might have lost patience. But I have found some fun in Warhammer 40,000 Tacticus, a fast-paced turn-based strategy game in the mobile phone mould that is scratching an itch I am somewhat depressed but unsurprised to find myself afflicted with. Read more  ( 19 min )

How warm is it? Is the air too humid? Are there volatile organic compounds in the air? Enviro Indoor will help you find out.  ( 65 min )

RS Components had been a manufacturer and distributor of Raspberry Pi since its launch in 2012.  ( 60 min )

Where FromSoftware's offerings weave a mysterious tale, wonderful level design, and meaningful combat into a tight package, Thymesia – like so many other Soulslikes - knows it must excel at one thing to compensate for the others. I've spent some time with the game's early levels and it perfectly captures what I'd consider to be a 'classical' Soulslike: a game that's heavily focused on The Combat Bit above all else. Does the game's combat rule? Yes, without a doubt. But will I continue playing? I'm not so sure. From what I've sampled, one strong pillar might not be enough to hold my attention for much longer. Read more  ( 18 min )

Golf games seem to be having a bit of a renaissance right now. From their beginnings on the fairway fringes of Flash-game forums, we now have been blessed with a handful of fun indie golf sims. We’ve seen the bizarre buffoonery of What The Golf?, the high-speed, eye-popping courses of Golf With Your Friends, and Secret Mode recently completely threw the clubs out the window and replaced them with highspeed motorcars in Turbo Golf Racing. It's safe to say that golfing games are always full of shenanigans and Cursed To Golf is no different. Playing as a golfer who has been cast into Golf Purgatory, you need to golf your way back to the land of the living, completing all eighteen holes in one roguelike run. It’s a fun premise and the game bursts with silliness and personality, but unfortunately Cursed To Golf fails to iron out certain roguelike frustrations. After mistiming a shot in the game’s final area and being sent back to the beginning (ending an excruciating four-hour run time), I truly did feel cursed. Read more  ( 20 min )

I'm a big fan of shared, collective funtimes, so I must lay flowers at the feet of posters on the Batman Arkham subreddit (maybe not flowers; like, bat-themed knives and big stompy boots. I don't know, what does Batman like?). A couple of weeks ago, with no new mainline Arkham game since 2015's Arkham Knight, they started discussing Batman: Arkham World, a fourth game in the series that came out in 2021. Except, of course, it does not exist. Read more  ( 17 min )

Quakecon started yesterday and to celebrate Microsoft have added another swathe of id Software and Bethesda games to both PC Game Pass and the Microsoft Store. That's not all, either, as there's also an id-themed freebie over on the Epic Games Store this week, and more Bethesda games going cheap in various sales. Here's everything you need to know about what's going on where. Read more  ( 17 min )

There was a time in multiplayer first-person shooters when Capture The Flag modes were as ubiquitous as Battle Royales. Also like Battle Royales, it was a mod that was responsible for that ubiquity: Threewave CTF for Quake. Now you can more easily play Threewave CTF again. Bethesda announced during Quakecon today that Threewave Capture The Flag was now part of their enhanced Quake release, with nine maps, the grappling hook and new improvements. Read more  ( 16 min )

Efter att säkerhetshål upptäckts i Apples enheter uppmanas användare att uppdatera sina telefoner så fort som möjligt.  ( 5 min )

Nvidias spelstreamingtjänst Geforce Now har uppgraderats och prenumeranter har nu möjlighet att spela i 1440p via webbläsaren.  ( 5 min )

I början av nästa år ämnar Samsung att spränga terabyte-gränsen på en enskild minnesmodul.  ( 5 min )

Last week I published initial Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux benchmarks using Asahi Linux and Arch Linux across the board. For ending out this week, here is a follow-up article looking more closely at the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3.  ( 5 min )

AMD has put out another point release in the ROCm 5.2 series for their "Radeon Open eCosystem" GPU compute stack for Linux...  ( 4 min )

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 22.2 is now available for testing ahead of the stable debut in the coming weeks...  ( 4 min )

Tow-Boot 2021.10-005 is now available for this open-source project that describes itself as "an opinionated distribution of U-Boot."..  ( 4 min )

Out this morning is version 12.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection...  ( 5 min )

For what used to be known as part of the KDE Software Compilation... Then most recently the straight-forward KDE Applications name to refer to the set of official KDE applications... Now KDE Gear is the current name for the official set of KDE applications. KDE Gear 22.08 is out today as the newest collection of KDE apps...  ( 4 min )

Workspaces are a great way to stay organized and productive. Here is how to create and use workspaces in Linux Mint Cinnamon.  ( 26 min )

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1005 packages other packages on CRAN (as celebrated in this blog post on passing 1000 packages from just four days ago), downloaded nearly 26 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 488 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings together tw…  ( 4 min )

The long-predicted shift finally happened.  ( 5 min )

Lower emissions and lower obesity would more than offset the added traffic deaths.  ( 6 min )

CHD says the ban came "without warning." Meta says it followed many violations.  ( 5 min )

Decent power for traveling or small hands.  ( 6 min )

The firm hopes stopping all health data collection will block the FTC's lawsuit.  ( 7 min )

The Moto Edge has a super-fast display, but can the MediaTek SoC keep up?  ( 5 min )

Problem has been assigned an official CVE ID, despite lack of specifics.  ( 5 min )

MacOS security researcher was able to bypass the fix issued just last weekend.  ( 4 min )

Text found in iOS app code says plan won't allow downloads for offline viewing.  ( 6 min )

Twitch streamers also hit for playing with modded characters like Jesus Christ.  ( 5 min )

After a chain of attacks, security firm got access to locations and recordings.  ( 5 min )

Swedish publication Vi Bilägare quantified the problem with new tests.  ( 7 min )

Such an initiative would require a 200-fold increase over current space-lift capacity.  ( 5 min )

Limited Run Games has also been acquired, along with five worldwide game studios.  ( 7 min )

The app is adding internal teams to review influencer posts for violations.  ( 6 min )

First CrossMark results of Intel's Core i5-13600HX leak.  ( 59 min )

AMD is reportedly dealing with serious AGESA microcode issues on its upcoming AM5 platform, which might delay Ryzen 7000's release window to late September.  ( 59 min )

Samsung envisions 1TB DDR5 modules to arrive in 2024, DDR5-7200 to hit the market in 2025.  ( 65 min )

Framework is changing the power button on its open source case design after a challenge from Lenovo claiming that it infringes upon Lenovo's Legion trademarks.  ( 59 min )

Intel factories in China's Sichuan Province, have been shutd down in order to reduce the strain in the electrical grid.  ( 59 min )

We help you find RTX 3070-powered gaming laptop deals.  ( 63 min )

New evidence surrounding Samsung's 990 Pro SSD suggest it will be either a PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 drive.  ( 59 min )

ThinkLearnDo has created a Raspberry Pi-powered keychain holder that can back up data overnight to a USB thumb drive.  ( 59 min )

The Core i9 Raptor Lake chip jumps from being 39% to 59% faster than its Alder Lake predecessor thanks to the application of an improved cooling solution.  ( 63 min )

Ubuntu has a new home: the VisionFive RISC-V board from StarFive.  ( 59 min )

Nvidia updates its Chrome and Edge browser implementation of GeForce Now to support 1440p and 120 fps gameplay for members of the RTX 3080 plan.  ( 59 min )

New Intel 700-series motherboards to enable extreme turbo boost levels for Intel's 13th Generation Core processors.  ( 59 min )

Big crypto miners have racked up massive debts, but their hardware is still worth a lot of cash. However, SDIG is well placed for market swings as it also owns power generation plants too.  ( 59 min )

The Dell Pro webcam offers 2K QHD resolution and performs well without any image adjustments or software tweaks.  ( 67 min )

Cooler Master adds to its high-performance gaming monitor stable with the GM27-FQS. It’s a 27-inch QHD/IPS panel with 165 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDR10 and a wide gamut. With accurate color and smooth video processing, it’s ready to play.  ( 68 min )

A bizarre situation in which a Janet Jackson music video can crash a laptop has gained official recognition.  ( 59 min )

The Roccat Kone XP Air does a pretty good job at drawing attention to itself with its eye-popping RGB and ergonomic design, but its $170 price tag is steep.  ( 63 min )

Here are the best RAM kits we’ve tested: computer memory ideal for gaming, video editing, and graphics-heavy applications.  ( 74 min )

Fraudsters send fake Microsoft Office USB drives to gain PC access and demand ransom.  ( 60 min )

Diablo 4 isn't due for release until next year, but in their latest quarterly update Blizzard have laid out their plans for post-release updates. Those plans include seasonal content, a paid season pass, and an in-game cosmetics shop. It's everything you'd expect (or exhaustedly resign yourself to) in a live service game. Read more  ( 16 min )

Several of my favourite games are basically just choose-your-own-adventure books and Beacon Pines makes that connection more explicit. It's an adventure game where you explore environments and unlock new words, which you can then deploy during pivotal story moments when the camera pulls back to reveal the whole game takes place on the pages of a book. It looks great, and it now has a release date: September 22nd. Read more  ( 16 min )

Ebuyer's Ebay store and the BANK15 code are teaming up again for more low-as-all-heck prices on a range of Nvidia RTX graphics cards. We've already covered quite a few of these this week, I know, but these are genuinely historic price drops on cards that have been almost impossible to find at a reasonable price for most of their lifetime. Today we've got three further selections for you: an RTX 3060, an RTX 3070 and an RTX 3080 Ti. Let's take a look! Read more  ( 17 min )

Over the past couple of years, software for playing tabletop roleplaying games remotely has become more popular than ever - for obvious reasons. Not content with people using third-party software such as Roll20, Wizards Of The Coast have announced today that they're making their own Dungeons & Dragons virtual tabletop using Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty swish. Read more  ( 16 min )

We've already covered a few deals using Ebay's current 15% off code, but there are so many items covered by this promotion that we're drawing from the well once more. This time, we found some good deals on brand new DDR4 RAM, offering you either a dual-channel 2x8GB kit or a single 16GB stick for under £60. To get these discounted prices, use code BANK15 at the checkout. Read more  ( 17 min )

This year’s QuakeCon begins today, and it’s once again being staged as a digital-only event. The organisers say they’re committed to being an in-person event again in 2023 but for now there’s still some intriguing streams to tune into starting from 6pm BST/7pm CEST/10am PST. Read on for more info and our personal highlights on what’s happening at QuakeCon 2022. Read more  ( 17 min )

Earlier this month, arcade roguelike Vampire Survivors added a cheat menu of ‘spells’ in its Not One patch. They’re going not-one better with the 0.11.100 patch today, christened The All-In-One, by adding in more cheats, a new character and two more weapons. Witness the arrival of Queen Sigma in the fancy trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

Today's topic for The Electronic Wireless Show podcast comes from listener Alastair Fakelastname, who suggested we talk about some of our favourite brave last stands in video game history. We do discuss what constitutes a last stand for the purposes of our discussion, but not until quite some time into the podcast. Many things are thrown into the ring, from RTS classics to famous boxart. Read more  ( 16 min )

I have a new favourite bug: Janet Jackson's 1989 certified choon Rhythm Nation had an uncanny ability to crash certain old laptops. This was nothing to do with the file itself; even being near another laptop playing the song could cause a crash. Turns out, one of the sonic frequencies in Rhythm Nation coincided with the natural resonant frequencies of a particular laptop hard drive, making it crash. Amazing. Perfect. A perfect bug. Read more  ( 16 min )

Side quests sure are fun, aren’t they? Newly announced indie open-world RPG All Hail Temos eschews a main story to double-down on those distracting tangents, in a fantasy world not too dissimilar from games in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series such as perennial favourite Skyrim. Delve into the blocky fantasy realm by watching the teaser trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

I often grumble about remasters and 'HD texture packs' making classic games look worse than the original (heck, I don't even play Quake with newfangled texture filtering). And yet, I am delighted by a new Doom mod which replaces all the sprites for enemies and items with new 3D forms. The secret is voxels, carefully recreating those old 2D sprites in 3D pixels. It's pretty great, in a 'makes the game actually look the way I had remembered it' sort of way. Read more  ( 16 min )

If you were fond of roguelike deck-building RPG Hand Of Fate and its sequel then you might be interested in the newly revealed superhero tactics RPG Capes. It’s in development at Spitfire Interactive, a freshly founded studio made up of former Hand Of Fate devs. None of the characters in the trailer seem to be wearing their blankets around their shoulders, but it’s worth a watch all the same. Read more  ( 17 min )

Just like the zombies that’ll presumably shamble around in it, Dead Island 2 keeps clinging on to life. Newly posted product listings for the console versions on Amazon US have shed some dying light – sorry – on the eternally-in-development horror game, first announced eight years ago at E3 2014. Here’s that infamous trailer once again, just for old times sake. Read more  ( 17 min )

Square Enix have made a vast array of RPGs over the years, but rarely have they ventured into the realm tactics and strategy games. A couple of big names come to mind, the obvious one being Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre if you count their PSP remake of Quest's SNES original, and most recently, Triangle Strategy on the Switch. Outside of that, though, it's all a bit barren, which is why the real-time tactical sword-swinging of their upcoming strategy RPG The DioField Chronicle is such an interesting landgrab for them. To say they're pushing into new territory would be an understatement. Happily, judging by the sizable first chapter of the game (currently available to play for free on Steam until the game's release on September 22nd), it's clear that Square Enix and their development partners at Lancarse have a lot of smart decisions here. With its focus on individual hero characters instead of nameless military units, mixed in with the magical pizazz and flashy summons of its Final Fantasy games, The DioField Chronicle could just be the Fire Emblem-shaped hole PC players have been looking for. Read more  ( 21 min )

It’s a running gag that Swedish conglomerate Embracer Group regularly buy up large chunks of the games industry, but now they’ve only gone and bought a whole universe. Embracer have acquired the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit properties from long-time owner The Saul Zaentz Company. That includes games, along with movies and other media content, folks. Ol’ Embracer have also acquired seven companies within the gaming realm. Read more  ( 17 min )

Spitfire Interactive, a new studio established by key members of the team that worked on acclaimed deck-building dungeon-crawler Hand of Fate, has unveiled Capes, a "gritty" new turn-based superhero RPG coming to Steam next year. Capes takes place in a world where, during the Golden Age of superheroes, the villains finally managed to get the upperhand, completely wiping out humanity's protectors. Two decades on, however, in a dystopian city where superpowers are outlawed, a new generation of superheroes begins to rise with the goal of finally ending the reign of evil once and for all. In gameplay terms, that action manifests as turn-based tactical battles where players deploy their super-powered units around the map, either travelling on-foot or via teleportation, to fight goons and supervillains, and rescue reluctant citizens. Read more  ( 15 min )

PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab has launched a new initiative that'll enable players to opt-in and help independent researchers from Oxford University's Internet Institute gather data for its research on gaming and mental health. From today, Steam players that select the 'research-edition – Research Edition 2022' drop-down option under PowerWash Simulator's Properties > Betas menu will gain access to what FuturLab calls a "one-of-a-kind anonymous research study centred around the well-being of PowerWash Simulator’s players [that] also aims to deliver insights into the larger discourse of gaming and mental health." FuturLab says two types of anonymous, de-identified data will be collected from players that opt-in to the PowerWash Simulator's Research Edition: 'base telemetry', which includes player progress and other general gameplay activities that'll be provided to the researchers for analysis, plus a second type made up of responses given directly to researchers by players. Read more  ( 15 min )

QuakeCon returns today as another digital-only event, and Microsoft is getting the celebrations started a little early with the announcement that a fresh batch of Bethesda and id Software titles - including Quake 4 and Wolfenstein 3D - have now joined Game Pass for PC. Additionally, a couple of games are currently free on the Microsoft Store. Starting with Xbox Game Pass on PC, five new titles have joined the line-up as of today. Alongside Quake 4 and Wolfenstein 3D, today sees the arrival of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. Additionally, subscribers can unlock all champions in Quake Champions via a special Game Pass Perk. And on the subject of Quake Champions, it's currently available free on the Microsoft Store, alongside two more QuakeCon freebies - The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. Also on the Microsoft Store, Heretic: Serpent Riders, Hexen: Beyond Heretic, and Hexen: Deathkings are now available for sale. Read more  ( 15 min )

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we're talking The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Middle-earth in general - as the rights to Tolkien's world are gobbled up by game publisher Embracer. It's another huge get for the Swedish conglomerate, which owns an increasingly enormous share of the video games industry. It also means Embracer will soon be in charge of the Middle-earth film and TV rights - and it's already talking about a fresh set of spin-offs and sequels. But what does this mean for Lord of the Rings video games? Will Embracer put some/many of its 100+ studios to work on Middle-earth projects? And what kinds of games would we like to see - and by whom? Tom Phillips, Victoria Kennedy, Ishraq Subhan and Liv Ngan discuss. Read more  ( 15 min )

You can currently get your hands on Doom 64 for free through the Epic Games Store. You could say this is one hell of a saving. Rumbleverse - Boom Boxer Content Pack is also up for grabs as a freebie at this time. These deals are both available until 25th August. After that, Ring of Pain will make its entry. Read more  ( 15 min )

MultiVersus players using mods are reportedly unable to launch the game following the most recent patch. PC players were using mods to add unofficial characters to the roster. But it appears Warner Bros is not pleased with the growing modding scene, having issued takedown notices for videos featuring mods in the game. Now it appears the game is up, with Warner Bros adding security features to stop the game running at all with mods. Read more  ( 15 min )

We described Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC as a patch or two away from perfection and our opinion hasn't changed! In our initial embargo day impressions piece, we also talked about how well the game runs on Steam Deck - and today we're going to go a little deeper, pushing the Valve handheld to its limits in terms of matching the PS4 and PS5 versions - and why we ultimately ended up dropping back settings for a more optimal experience. Our final optimised settings for the Deck were also deployed on the new AyaNeo Air - a smaller, more compact PC handheld with an OLED display. It hasn't got the raw horsepower of the Deck, but somehow it's still capable of a perfectly reasonable Spider-Man experience. First things first - we've got to tackle the hot potato that is the 30fps cap we reco…  ( 21 min )

Elden Ring is continuing its strong reign. The latest figures from publisher Bandai Namco reveal that the fantasy epic has now topped 16.6m sales worldwide (thanks, Gematsu). This figure includes both digital and physical copies of the game. In May, Elden Ring had sold 13.4m copies since its launch towards the start of the year. This means that, in just three months, another 3.2m units have been shifted. To borrow from Ed, Elden Ring is clearly doing GRReat! Read more  ( 15 min )

Some PlayStation 5 owners are reportedly struggling to play 2019's Call of Duty Modern Warfare reboot on their consoles. When attempting access any of the three components of the game - Campaign, Multiplayer and Spec Ops - players are greeted with a message stating that the required data packs are not installed. That's when the problems start. When players follow through the prompts to download the data packs, they are confronted with a message stating that their installation was "suspended." There's no other suggestion as to what's causing this. Read more  ( 16 min )

I've been watching the genuinely still very good Phineas and Ferb for the first time in over a decade recently, a show that is essentially about doing absolutely everything you can on summer vacation. The absurdity of it is wonderful, but if we reduce it to just 'doing a LOT while it's summer,' it's not that relatable to me. Which is why it's slightly ironic that I've been playing Shin Chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation, a game where you do almost nothing, something I find reflects me much better. And it lets you do nothing in the most soothing ways possible. Before I go into why a game where you don't do much is somehow a good thing, we need some important context. Shin Chan might be familiar to you if you, like me, watched it on Cartoon Network as a kid, but the Summer Vacation series is one you're less likely to be familiar with. Boku no Natsuyasumi (or My Summer Vacation) originally appeared on the first PlayStation in 2000, but unfortunately was never released in English. It was made by developer Millenium Kitchen, who also made Shin Chan: Me and the Professor, and is quite simply a game about a young boy exploring a countryside village. You collect bugs, bottle caps, and meet the locals, and not much else. And while I've not had the opportunity to play the game due to the language barrier, it looks like exactly my shit. Read more  ( 18 min )

Nintendo will lose up to 20 percent from its Switch console boxes in order to squeeze more units into each shipment. A new report by Nikkei states the change will help Nintendo shift greater stock volumes more quickly, and also for less money. Vooks, which translated the report, calculated that Nintendo had already shrunk the Switch's box by around 14 percent for its more recent Switch OLED version. Read more  ( 15 min )

Earlier in the year, a report stated the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic remake was "in serious trouble". So much trouble, in fact, the remake was said to be "delayed indefinitely". Following on from this, Embracer - parent company of developer Aspyr - has revealed that one of its AAA projects has transitioned to another studio within the group. While which project this is was not named in the company's Q1 interim report, informed speculation points to this being the troubled KOTOR remake. Read more  ( 16 min )

Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios was working on an Iron Man game for two years before the project was cancelled. In an interview with MinnMax, Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg said that the developer was approached by Disney and Marvel in 2012 and began work on the game that year. However, things quickly went awry. According to Sundberg, Disney had shortened the development time by one year, which increased the development budget since the studio would need to hire 70-80 people to finish the game in time. Read more  ( 15 min )

A mod which replaced the Pride flags with USA flags in Spider-Man Remastered has been removed from mod websites. The modding community for Spider-Man Remastered has been pretty active since the game's release on PC last week, creating mods to change the pigeons into rats and all sorts of other fun character switches. However, one mod which caught attention has been more divisive. The mod in question replaced any Pride flags that appeared in the game with the US flag. Uploaded on 15th August to Nexus Mods, it was removed by site staff on 17th August. A similar mod appeared on ModDB, which has also been removed. Read more  ( 16 min )

Toys for Bob, the Activision-owned development studio behind its Skylanders series, is teasing a new project. In recent years, Toys for Bob has found fresh fame developing the Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy and Spyro Reignited Trilogy, before tackling the well-received Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. Since then - like virtually every other Activision studio - Toys for Bob has been assisting on Call of Duty development, specifically on Warzone. Read more  ( 15 min )

A set of images from Dead Island 2, and the game's apparent release date, have leaked online. A new listing (which has since seen key details removed) was spotted on Amazon last night, with the release date stated to be 3rd February, 2023. As shared by Wario64, the listing also included story details about the upcoming game. It will reportedly take place in Los Angeles, "from the verdant suburbia of Beverly Hills to the quirky promenade of Venice Beach". Read more  ( 15 min )

If you ever want to give yourself a mild existential crisis, take a glance at the stats for your favourite game. It turns out I've spent a solid 40 days of my life sailing the Sea of Thieves since its launch back in 2018 (I’ll admit to that being considerably less than I was expecting), which might go someway to explaining why, four and a half years on, its vast oceanic expanse feels like a second home. Given how much of a sucker I am for a swashbuckling pirate yarn, there was a certain inevitability to my love affair with Sea of Thieves, but pretending it was a foregone conclusion would do a huge disservice to developer Rare's astonishing work imbuing its game with such distinctive charms. Even at launch - when, for all its fancy pirate dressing, its endless roiling oceans and multitude of beautifully wrought islands, it was, at heart, a pretty simple game of tug of war - there was a special kind of magic to Sea of Thieves that made it so much more than its component parts. Its core loop was, and to a certain extent still remains, a simple one, where every treasure gained was treasure waiting to be stolen, and every treasure stolen was treasure waiting to be retrieved. But its power was in the peripheral details, where every journey existed on the thrilling edge of chaos as its emergent additions - the pervasive threat of other players, a passing storm, a kraken attack, or perhaps even all three - coalesced around its functional core to create always unpredictable yarns. Read more  ( 23 min )

Embracer Group is to buy Middle-earth Enterprises, which will give the Swedish conglomerate the rights to JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. In a press release, Embracer discussed its process of buying Middle-earth Enterprises, although it did not disclose the sum of this deal, citing "commercial reasons" for this decision. This deal will mean that Embracer will own the rights to motion pictures, video games, board games, merchandising, theme parks and stage productions relating to Tolkein's works. Read more  ( 15 min )

Staff remind CEO 'don't be evil' and treat workers equally Hundreds of Googlers this week demanded CEO Sundar Piachi do a better job protecting people seeking abortions by refusing to hand over to law enforcement any customer data that could be used to build a criminal case, and extending the health benefits full-time employees enjoy to contract workers.…  ( 6 min )

Aiming to make Helium the standard for decentralized networks DIY 5G network outfit FreedomFi has been bought by Nova Labs, the founding team behind the Helium Network.…  ( 5 min )

Utility companies are offering $2 per kWh for power stored in battery tech More Tesla Powerwall owners in California are getting the option to help fight blackouts – and get paid for it – as thecompany expands its virtual power plant (VPP) program to new areas of the Golden State. …  ( 5 min )

Best before September 15, 2023 Microsoft has demonstrated that it really does care about Windows on Arm with a new Dev Channel build for Windows that brings native Arm64 support to its camera app as a low-impact start.…  ( 5 min )

Beijing says legislation designed to interfere with its own efforts to build homegrown semiconductor industry China has reacted negatively to the passing of the US CHIPS Act, saying that the program is anti-competitive and aims to block the Middle Kingdom's efforts to build up its own semiconductor industry.…  ( 5 min )

46 million requests per second network flood comes as attacks increase by more than 200% compared to last year Google says it has blocked the largest ever HTTPS-based distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June, which peaked at 46 million requests per second.…  ( 6 min )

Yep, that’s the same company a short-seller is alleging is a ‘useless toy’ Quantum computing startup IonQ now has a second system available on Microsoft's Azure Quantum cloud platform, claiming it will open quantum systems to a wider audience.…  ( 5 min )

It's taken Mountain View a year to refine the service for the Continent It has taken just over a year, but Google has finally made its Google Workspace Individual product available to European customers.…  ( 4 min )

As mission-critical nature of software supports prices, users also find reason to invest Despite inflation hitting a 40-year high and expected recessions, growth in enterprise software spending is expected to plow on at a steady 12 percent, according to figures from Forrester.…  ( 5 min )

For all the billions poured in, is a 'Made in America' sticker worth it? Analysis  With all the fanfare and foundry expansions around the signing of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the semiconductor shortage will soon be over, and the US will emerge as a silicon powerhouse rivaling that of Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix.…  ( 6 min )

'Even on a small coin battery, it could run for more than 10 years' claims researcher A newly published research paper describes a compute-in-memory (CIM) chip that combines artificial neurons with resistive RAM (RRAM) so that the AI model weights can be stored and processed on the same chip.…  ( 8 min )

Financial Services Commission also creates a digital assets task force South Korea's Financial Intelligence Unit (KoFIU) said on Thursday it has identified 16 foreign crypto businesses it will investigate for operating unregistered.…  ( 4 min )

First stage hot fire and launch from UK soil in 2023 Brit rocketeers Skyrora have perched a second stage of its orbital class Skyrora XL atop a stack of containers and performed a successful static fire test of the engine.…  ( 4 min )

And it IS a crowd – marketplace is busy. Customers get choice of analytics engine and storage layer in open approach Former Hadoop stalwart Cloudera has announced a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) version of its data platform which it claims is more open than rivals in the over-crowded market.…  ( 5 min )

Is this it? The robo-butler dream is coming true? Video  Google's largest AI language model is helping robots be more flexible in understanding and interpreting human commands, according to the web giant's latest research.…  ( 5 min )

Which flavors are the lightest and the heaviest disk and memory-wise? The Reg FOSS desk has lined up the official Ubuntu remixes to see which ones hog the most or least of your computer's resources.…  ( 11 min )

Food and fuels, too? Totally not sounding like a Star Trek replicator Last year, NASA produced oxygen on Mars. Now, scientists experimenting here on Earth may have found a much more efficient method of doing so for future missions. The resulting equipment could be used to produce the necessary materials for human colonization, too.…  ( 5 min )

Hardware still required – plus tolerance for visiting the office and remote collaboration Microsoft has advised its partner community that it will soon drop the price it charges for Teams Rooms, and add a version of the product aimed at small business.…  ( 5 min )

Clop gang thought it hit Thames Water – but real victim was elsewhere A water company in the drought-hit UK was recently compromised by a ransomware gang, though initially it was unclear exactly which water company was the victim.…  ( 6 min )

Nastymail tracking service blames sloppy sending practices for swelling lists of dangerous mailers Spam-tracking service Spamhaus reported Tuesday that some of the world's biggest brands are getting loose with their email practices, causing its spam blocklists (SBL) to swell significantly.…  ( 4 min )

Another reason not to play 1989’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ – it messes with hard disk drives The music video for Janet Jackson’s 1989 song “Rhythm Nation” has been recognised as a cybersecurity vulnerability after Microsoft reported it can crash old laptop computers.…  ( 5 min )

Network boffins can't say why, suggest not using the worst providers China's DNS resolvers fail two thirds of the time when handling queries for IPv6 addresses, and botch one in eight queries for IPv4, according to a group of Chinese academics.…  ( 4 min )

As if the VR giants will let that stand – worth a try, though Imagine for a moment that you wanted to spend time in what Meta solipsistically calls the metaverse, a keiretsu of interactive cartoon panoramas powered by commercial surveillance and payment persuasion.…  ( 8 min )

Chrome flaw has public exploit, WebKit hole actively abused along with kernel escalation Google has issued 11 security fixes for desktop Chrome, including one bug that has an exploit for it out in the wild.…  ( 5 min )

Following optional "__bf16" support being added to the x86-64 psABI as a special type for representing 16-bit Brain Floating Point Format for deep learning / machine learning applications, the GCC and LLVM compilers have now landed their __bf16 type support...  ( 5 min )

Made public back in June by Intel was the MMIO Stale Data vulnerabilities. The disclosure noted affected Intel products range from Haswell up through Rocket Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake servers. However, pre-Haswell Intel CPUs might be impacted too while the Linux kernel to this point was incorrectly stating older CPUs are "not affected" by MMIO Stale Data...  ( 5 min )

While the Qt Group (most recently known as The Qt Company) is known for its Qt toolkit and related Qt Creator integrated development environment, Qt Design Studio, and related software centered around their cross-platform toolkit, they have acquired German software maker Axivion GmbH as they expand their product portfolio beyond just Qt...  ( 5 min )

With Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids expected to make more of a splash coming up, it's a good time to revisit the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" performance to see how the Linux software performance has evolved since last year's launch. In this article are benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server from May 2021 with CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu compared to fresh installs now of those latest Linux distribution releases.

LibreOffice 7.4 is out today as the latest major update to this open-source, cross-platform office suite. This leading free software office suite now supports WebP images as well as a variety of other improvements to its various components...

While Intel is normally fast at contributing improvements for new hardware to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, just today and ahead of the approaching Raptor Lake launch has a proper scheduler model finally been added for existing Alder Lake P processors...  ( 5 min )

AMD has published their latest routine snapshot of AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal cross-platform Vulkan driver sources and is an alternative to the unofficial but popular Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver...  ( 5 min )

Last year marked the release of Mold 1.0 as a modern, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold was started by Rui Ueyama who previously worked on the LLVM linker. Mold has continued seeing new features added and out today is version 1.4.1 where "alpha" support for macOS is added and also beginning to work on CMake build system integration...  ( 4 min )

Krita 5.1 is out today as the newest evolutionary update to this leading open-source, cross-platform digital painting program...  ( 4 min )

Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" is one of the most exciting low-level kernel innovations in recent time and is already used by Google's Chrome OS and Android as well as having proven itself in various other downstream kernel builds. MGLRU is planned for upstreaming in Linux 6.1 and in preparation for that, Andrew Morton has now queued those patches into his "mm-unstable" branch for further vetting...  ( 5 min )

NTFS3 as the modern Linux kernel read/write file-system driver for NTFS that was open-sourced by Paragon Software is seeing some late code refactoring and fixes for Linux 6.0...  ( 5 min )

Ny patch ute.  ( 6 min )

Sköldpaddspåven gillar't.  ( 6 min )

Massa Bethesda-spel i heldigitalt, streamat event.  ( 6 min )

Uppföljaren till den omtyckta AA-titeln från Asobo Studio.  ( 6 min )

Och fyra nya skärmdumpar såväl som en beskrivning.  ( 6 min )

No content preview  ( 6 min )

Stort avslöjande på tisdag nästa vecka.  ( 6 min )

Att predika och ge blodsoffer till gudarna - vem hade kunnat ana att det skulle vara så här kul?  ( 9 min )

Skurkar - frukta Tornadon from Näsviken!  ( 6 min )

I veckans quiz får dina äventyrsgener bekänna färg.  ( 6 min )

Köper även Tripwire, Tuxedo Labs med flera. Och släpper kvartalsrapport. Puh!  ( 7 min )

Men företagspolitik satte käppar i hjulet.  ( 6 min )

Såväl som spelets omslag och beskrivning.  ( 6 min )

Och bekräftas även till Game Pass.  ( 6 min )

18 oktober försöker vi vinna som spöke eller spökjägare.  ( 6 min )

Hanoi Studios have today put up their second multi-developer bundle on Steam, with a primary focus on highlighting studios that support Linux.  ( 4 min )

Sneaking out at some point, Covert Critter is an upcoming stealth action game that will have Native Linux support. It's also pretty much Metal Gear Solid with animals.  ( 4 min )

The weekend is coming closer and you want some new games? Check out the small Paradox Interactive bundle from Humble Bundle with a few of what they've published.  ( 3 min )

Embracer Group are quite terrifying. The amount of power they have in the gaming industry is simply insane and now they're swallowing up more studios and even the full rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  ( 4 min )

Valve has announced three things recently including multiple updates that are out now for the Steam Deck, plus a quick tease of what's to come for a Beta of SteamOS 3.4.  ( 5 min )

New Tales from the Borderlands is set to be released October 21, according to a listing on Amazon. The listing has since been removed, but luckily the internet is faster than a speeding finger hitting delete, and Gematsu was able to grab all the details. For starters, there will be a pre-order incentive called the Adventure Capital Pack that comes with cosmetics for the characters Anu, Octavio, and Fran, It also comes with 10,000 in-game currency as well as an FL4K Vaultlander collectible for use in-game. Read more  ( 15 min )

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered was released last Friday, and Insomniac Games and Nixxes Software have released a first small patch with multiple fixes and improvements. According to the developers, the teams are working on the next patch that will be more substantial and consists of bug fixes, improvements, and additional features, based on the feedback received. This patch fixes various ray-tracing-related crashes, improves Windows version check to prevent false positives, makes visual improvements to HBAO+, and fixes the issue where ray-traced reflections in stainless steel were rendered distorted. Read more  ( 15 min )

Brawlers haven’t seen as much moving and shaking as other genres in recent years. They seem to be mostly stuck in a phase of trying to recreate and perfect what came before, and not so much push things forward. Punching, kicking, and grappling are easy to enjoy in most of them – but few really feel like they came out in our modern era, and fewer yet want you to be the star of your action movie quite like Midnight Fight Express. I’ve had my eye on Midnight Fight Express since before it even had an official title. Back in the beginning, solo developer Jacob Dzwinel would share brief GIFs of cool stunts and beat-downs, and everyone would lose their minds. I remained skeptical; many games look sharp in carefully-edited trailers, and anyone good enough at a game’s combat can produce gold. Read more  ( 22 min )

QuakeCon 2022 kicks off today, and to celebrate, id Software and Bethesda PC Classics are coming to PC Game Pass. You can expect more than 10 PC games covering FPS and RPG titles as well as a sale on select titles. Coming today with PC Game Pass are Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 4, Wolfenstein 3D, An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. You can also unlock all Champions in Quake Champions via a Game Pass Perk. Read more  ( 15 min )

Bandai Namco has released its consolidated financial results for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, and the report notes a rather high number of Elden Ring sales. According to the results, the FromSoftware title has sold over 16.6 million digital and physical units combined worldwide (via Gamebiz and Gematsu). The figure is quite a jump from May when the company reported 13.4 million units were sold within the first month of availability. Read more  ( 15 min )

Remember Pingu? The kids claymation program that was on TV years ago, where the lovable penguin Pingu went out his daily life eating fish and getting yelled at by his dad? Thanks to the work of one Unity developer - Adrian Mendez - Pingu has found a new home far from the arctic as a boss in an Elden Ring inspired project uploaded to the creator’s channels for the world to see. In the short video (embedded below) you can see a gargantuan Pingu break through the earth draped in red light. With a deep “Noot noot” he quickly raises a flipper and slaps the player character to death in a single strike in a scene eerily familiar to those with some time invested into Elden Ring. Tragically, this is not a mod we can experience for ourselves. Instead, Mendez built the scene from the group up in Unity, writing in the description of the video: “This is not a game, just a little project. Sometimes I'm bored…” As for the inspiration for this short but sweet vid, Adrian points to a music mix titled ‘Pingu: NOOT NOOT Theme Song but it's DARK SOULS BOSS MUSIC’ which alters Mozart’s Lacrimosa to better reflect a boss theme suitable for the beloved bird. Read more  ( 16 min )

Embracer Group, known for an ever-growing collection of video game studios and IP, has swallowed up even more as news that Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth has now fallen under the Embracer umbrella. This means that any new games, television shows, or other types of media that release within Tolkien’s world will do so under the giant burning eye of Embracer Group. The higher ups at Embracer Group have also shopped around and grabbed a handful of other notable video game companies, including Killing Floor developer Tripwire Interactive (who also published Chivalry 2 in 2021). The developers of Teardown — Tuxedo Labs — have also been acquired. They’ve also gone and grabbed Limited Run Games! That last one might sound familiar to those with a taste for fancy physical video game releases, as they’ve been creating limited special editions of titles for years now. All in all, it’s a big haul for Embracer, who seem to be inching closer and closer to swallowing up the entire industry every month. Read more  ( 15 min )

The Pokemon World Championships has finally returned to an in-person event in London, and all of the action throughout the weekend will be streamed live on Twitch. That isn't all that there is to be excited about either, given that there are going to be multiple Pokemon GO code giveaways during the stream too. The championships have already started, with things kicking off at 9am BST on Thursday 18 August. However, if you haven't had the time to tune in yet, don't fear; the event, and stream, will be running until Sunday, 21 August. Read more  ( 17 min )

Dead Island 2 was initially announced all the way back in 2014 at E3, and after having been in development for quite the amount of time, it appears that the game may finally have a release date. A recent tweet from user Wario64 revealed that a brand new listing for Dead Island 2 was on Amazon, revealing a release date, platforms, and lengthy description for the game. As ever, all leaks are to be taken with a pinch of salt, and this release date could very well be a placeholder, but for now, Dead Island 2 could be arriving as soon as February 3, 2023. Read more  ( 17 min )

Kod i Netflix IOS-applikation indikerar att streamingtjänstens kommande reklamfinansierade abonnemang saknar möjlighet att ladda ner filmer och serier.  ( 5 min )

Commodore 64 firar 40 år och då passar det bra med ett quiz om gamla mikrodatorer.  ( 5 min )

Bolagets kommande SSD-enhet MP700 ska tack vare en ny kontrollerkrets med stöd för PCI Express 5.0 kunna nå sekventiella läshastigheter på 10 000 MB/s.  ( 6 min )

Svenska speljätten Embracer vill köpa upp Middle-earth Enterprises, som äger rättigheterna till Sagan om ringen och Bilbo – En hobbits äventyr.  ( 6 min )

Commodore 64 firar 40 år. Har någon annan dator betytt så mycket för framtiden? Chefredaktören delar med sig av lite nostalgi och minnen.  ( 8 min )

Om mindre än en vecka finns Intel Arc A380 att köpa i Nordamerika, med en prislapp som stannar en bit under den jämförbara rivalen från AMD.  ( 5 min )

No content preview  ( 2 min )

Looking to book a large house on a weekend? You'll have to jump through a few hoops Pleased with the "success" of a pilot program in Australia, Airbnb is bringing its "anti-party technology" to the US and Canada. …  ( 5 min )

Top tip: Your RSA private key should not be copied from a public code tutorial A developer says he was able to run his own software on his car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicle's manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from programming examples.…  ( 6 min )

.NET-based malware can push wide range of malicious payloads, and evades detection, Secureworks says A highly pervasive .NET-based crypter that has flown under the radar since about 2015 and can deliver a wide range of malicious payloads continues to evolve rapidly, with almost 10,000 code samples being uploaded to VirusTotal over a 16-month period.…  ( 6 min )

As promised, Peter Beck is sending a Photon next year. Because he can Rocket Lab's Peter Beck is sending a Photon spacecraft carrying a small probe to Venus, marking the culmination of a childhood ambition for the CEO.…  ( 5 min )

Linux distro announces the availability of Microsoft tooling on Jammy Jellyfish Ubuntu and Microsoft have brought .NET 6 to the Ubuntu repositories, meaning that you can install it without adding any extra sources to the OS.…  ( 5 min )

Misinformation's a concern, but Chinese media giant's own data privacy practices also have people worried TikTok has joined Twitter in publishing new US midterm misinformation rules, with considerable crossover in scope and style.…  ( 5 min )

Boeing 747-based platform now back in California with almost a month to go before science operations end The doomed SOFIA observatory has made an earlier-than-planned return from New Zealand as the Boeing 747-based platform prepares to enter its final month of operations.…  ( 4 min )

While enterprises are spending more on infrastructure than ever before, what goes up must come down The datacenter industry may be starting to feel the effects of the economic slowdown, leading to further impacts on IT vendors and other suppliers, according to reports, while operators in the UK in particular are feeling the pain from rising energy costs.…  ( 5 min )

@CEO, that macro looks sus, amirite? Microsoft's Excel is to continue its march to be the coolest software kid on the block as @ mentions move closer to general availability for the desktop version.…  ( 4 min )

Billions in funding at stake as PM hopeful Liz Truss says bloc 'in breach of agreement' The UK government has launched formal consultations with the EU over the failure to secure its inclusion in the EU's €95.5 billion ($97.6 billion) research funding program since the island nation left the world's richest trading bloc.…  ( 5 min )

Lucy probe is five years away from getting a closeup of Polymele's satellite NASA scientists working on the Lucy mission, humanity's first exploration of the "Trojan" asteroids that orbit Jupiter's Lagrange points, have found a moon around one of the asteroids the probe will visit.…  ( 5 min )

Desktop environment celebrates milestone birthday with a beta The two original developers behind the GNOME project started work 25 years ago, and the 43rd version of their brainchild is nearly here.…  ( 5 min )

Saaaaandia, where the wind comes sweeping 'cross the sea … A novel offshore wind turbine design has been waiting for the right modeling software to come along to help make it a reality, and scientists reckon they've finally built it.…  ( 5 min )

Scary in post-Roe America, and Poland, and far too many other places It's official: your period and/or pregnancy tracker will probably share your data with law enforcement. And they might even do it on purpose.…  ( 8 min )

Precedent essentially meant that search results could be considered defamatory, which is dumb Australia's High Court has overturned the 2020 decision that search results pointing to news stories make Google a publisher.…  ( 4 min )

Two trusts saw nearly $18 million go up in smoke when Sensyne Health was delisted from AIM Two NHS hospitals in the UK have lost nearly £15 million ($18 million) between them due to the collapse in value of an AI startup.…  ( 5 min )

Does it hope to run Doom on the Moon or something? NASA has awarded a $50 million contract to Microchip Technology, the microcontroller giant, to develop next-generation processors that will enable space computers to be 100 times faster than they currently are.…  ( 5 min )

Testimonials from Russian generals not welcomed by DJI or Unitree Robotics Russia's military has praised civilian grade Chinese-made drones and robots for having performed well on the battlefield, leading their manufacturers to point out the equipment is not intended or sold for military purposes.…  ( 5 min )

Results are rubbish on Earth, but Mars United could be undisputed champions Rocketry, energy, automotive, AI, tequila, tunneling and (maybe) social media entrepreneur Elon Musk has proclaimed his intention to buy Manchester United — the organization often cited as the world's most supported football club.…  ( 4 min )

Rubbishes suggestions poisoned clones or ancient malware are worthy reasons for ban Developers of the open source VideoLAN media player have started sniping at India's government over an apparent block on the project's website.…  ( 5 min )

There's some pocket change in it for you, if you can crack this nut DARPA – the US government's boffinry nerve center – is offering up to $10,000 to programmers who can whip up some AI to help find rare earth minerals on our home world and ease US supply constraints of critical materials needed by the energy and defense industry.…  ( 6 min )

谢谢 美国! US Commerce Department can make all the noise it wants about limiting tech exports to China, but it is reportedly doing little to actual stem the flow of components and equipment.…  ( 5 min )

Sign-on you crazy diamond RubyGems.org, the Ruby programming community's software package registry, now requires maintainers of popular "gems" to secure their accounts using multi-factor authentication (MFA).…  ( 5 min )

It's the fifth Chrome zero-day patched by Google this year.  ( 4 min )

New chips, new cameras, and the death of the iPhone mini are all possibilities.  ( 5 min )

Dealmaster also has the Xbox Series S, 8BitDo gamepads, and board games.  ( 9 min )

High Court finds Google isn't a publisher, says "a hyperlink is merely a tool."  ( 6 min )

A modern, thoughtful update to the visual novel concept for disaffected Gen Z.  ( 6 min )

Kernel and WebKit bugs can allow arbitrary code execution on Apple's devices.  ( 4 min )

"The ambition of the show was to make it an eight-hour Tim Burton movie."  ( 7 min )

Cultural, structural changes to shift focus from scientific publishing to public health action.  ( 5 min )

64-bit-only mode promises better performance and security.  ( 5 min )

Ryzen 7000 and Zen 4 will be a big overhaul for AMD's successful Ryzen CPUs.  ( 5 min )

Pilot program reduced banned parties in Australia by 35 percent, company says.  ( 5 min )

VPNs on Apple mobile devices reportedly keep connections open and expose data.  ( 6 min )

Intel, Micron set to cut capital spending despite new law aiming to boost production.  ( 5 min )

It’s more than just a showcase of the company's latest EV technology.  ( 6 min )

"Breakthrough science is possible."  ( 6 min )

Finland avoided some of the mistakes made elsewhere and opened its waste repository.  ( 6 min )

Anti-vaccine org calls dip in childhood vaccination a pandemic "silver lining."  ( 6 min )

It's not that Google doesn't like RSS, it just wants RSS to look like Google.  ( 5 min )

Thunderbolt graphics card enclosures are one of the coolest bits of kit you can get, I think. Open up this metal box, put a graphics card inside, and suddenly any PC or laptop you connect to it via Thunderbolt gets a substantial upgrade in gaming prowess. These docks used to cost around £200 or £300, but recently we've started to see radically more affordable options - and today we've reached a new low-water mark. The Lenovo Legion BoostStation can handle GPUs up to 300W (think an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti or AMD RX 6800 XT), and is available for just £93 when you use the code BANK15 to knock 15% off the price at Ebay. Read more  ( 16 min )

Do you still have a laptop or desktop in your life running off a hard drive? Right now you can pick up a comfortably-sized 480GB SATA SSD for less than £30, thanks to a discount code available at Ebuyer's Ebay store. Use code BANK15 to drop the price of a cheap and cheerful Adata SU630 SSD from £35 to £29.78, and marvel at the speed and responsiveness improvement you'll see on machines that were previously running on mechanical hard drives. I performed an upgrade using a similar drive on my brother's old laptop, and it breathed new life into a machine almost ten years old. Read more  ( 16 min )

Dating sim dungeon-crawler Boyfriend Dungeon is marking its one-year anniversary with the free Secret Weapons update, out today. The DLC adds a fresh dungeon to delve into, along with three new weapons to romance the scabbards off. Gaze starry-eyed at the new update’s trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

The solo developer behind the excellent visual novel One Night Stand has revealed their next game project today, and it's quite possibly the perfect cross-section of all my interests. It's called Videoverse, and is described as a narrative adventure above love and friendship, inspired by Nintendo's now defunct social network, Miiverse (which all Wii U and 3DS owners know is the single, most wholesome thing to have ever existed in video games). Have a watch of the teaser trailer below. Read more  ( 17 min )

Developers Shiny Shoe are best known for their roguelike deckbuilder Monster Train, which Matt Cox slapped a Bestest Best badge onto in his review. And I got an early look at their upcoming game Inkbound, a co-op roguelike that ditches the usual realtime room-clearing for turn-based battling. From what I've seen, it looks like it has potential. Read more  ( 17 min )

Luca Le Fae has had it. His work as a writer for Leviathan Games, one of the biggest game developers on the planet, may pay well, but it’s creatively unfulfilling. A fateful encounter with his old acquaintance, Jey Zhang, at a party may just provide Luca with the escape he has been looking for. Jey, a successful music producer, remembers Luca as an incredible songwriter and asks him if he has any samples he could send her. Suddenly the unthinkable, a single, an EP, perhaps even actual stardom, seems within Luca’s grasp, but life has a tendency to get in the way even when you’re ready to take the chance of a lifetime. We Are OFK can be described as a 3D visual novel or a mildly interactive five-part TV series you just happened to buy on Steam. The first two episodes are available on launch day, with episodes three to five releasing weekly after the game's initial release. Each one comes with its own opening, which really sells the feeling of catching a new episode of a miniseries each week. With each episode, you follow the story from a different band member's point of view, from their initial decision to be band-adjacent to taking their first wobbly steps in promoting themselves as artists. Joining Luca on his journey are pianist Itsumi Saito, who works in social media management at Leviathan, and Luca’s housemate Flores, an audio-visual effects artist. Read more  ( 19 min )

Free-to-play Korean MMO Lost Ark is getting a new update, Under The Arkesian Sun, on August 24. This update welcomes Legendary Pet status, with useful perks that can buff your max HP, and a new spot in the Stronghold called the Pet Ranch. Read more  ( 16 min )

New set images have leaked from the production of Amazon’s Fallout TV show, and they appear to show the inside of Vault 32. There’s also a nice bit of propaganda that reads “The outside world can never hurt you” and shows a superheroic Vault Boy deflecting nukes with a shield. How very Fallout. Read on to take a look at some of the images below. Read more  ( 17 min )

Heard joke once: man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great game Neon White is out now. Go and play it. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor... I am Neon White. No, wait. What did you say? Did you say white or blight? Oh, white, oh, okay." Read more  ( 15 min )

Time has never been very kind to QUBE. The first-person puzzler first began life as a university project in the late 00s, but by the time it finally launched commercially in early 2012, it was almost universally written off as nothing but an okay Portal clone. In fairness, there was a lot working against it. Like Portal, it was set in a largely white, sterile testing facility, and while it didn't involve flinging boxes through portals, each one of its puzzles did revolve around manipulating brightly coloured blocks to progress to the next room. The one major thing it was lacking, and probably a large part of why it never really stacked up to Portal at the time, was a GLaDOS-sized villain. QUBE's story would come later, in the 2014 Director's Cut, which added an entire script, voice-acting and a revamped musical score to give Toxic Games' puzzler a bit more, well, shape. Even with all those extra flourishes, though, the Director's Cut was still the same QUBE puzzles from before, leading many to write off the update yet again as a slight improvement on the original, but nothing to get too excited about. Now, in 2022, QUBE is getting a fancy 10th Anniversary Edition that rebuilds both versions of the game from the ground up, while also adding an entirely new sector that doubles the length of the game. And I'm telling you: please don't write off QUBE for the third time in its life. It deserves better than that. Read more  ( 21 min )

If you were ever fond of roguelike deckbuilding ARPG Hand Of Fate and its sequel then you might be interested in the newly revealed superhero tactics RPG Capes. It’s in development at Spitfire Interactive, a freshly founded studio made up of former Hand Of Fate devs. None of the characters in the trailer seem to be wearing their blankets around their shoulders, but it’s worth a watch all the same. Read more  ( 17 min )

Tower Of Fantasy is a free-to-play MMO gacha game, the sort of game that implores you to spend in-game currency on lootboxes in the hopes you'll build a particularly powerful collection of anime people. Genshin Impact wrapped this business model up in a surprisingly excellent open world RPG, that Graham called one of the best games of 2020. Tower Of Fantasy pulls from a neighbouring gacha vending machine, except that its mixture of MMO, realtime combat, and lootboxing isn't wrapped up in as consistent a package. Read more  ( 20 min )

Valve have launched the SteamVR 1.23 update, and to mark the occasion, they’re letting you… look at high-quality scanned models of genuinely deceased insects? That they found? I guess??? Key technical improvements to SteamVR include multiple crash fixes, smoother controller animations and new extension support for the OpenXR platform; the full patch notes are on Steam. But the update also adds a new SteamVR Home setting that – and I quote, with emphasis Valve’s - "showcases CT scans of actual dead bugs we found lying on the ground outside our office." See? The Valve Index isn’t just for playing Half-Life Alyx, eh. Read more  ( 16 min )

Last time, you decided that nude mods are better than going into meats and guts. Oh sure, you're brave with your votes, but not one single commenter was brave enough to address the subject of honking their pud. Cowards. If you won't expand, we have to move on. This week, I pose a question of squeaky critters versus a squeaky coat. What's better: a level 1 rat, or Alone In The Dark's jacket inventory? Read more  ( 19 min )

The Twitter account for Microsoft’s PC Game Pass service decided to change their profile picture, and coyly drew attention to its familiar looking mist-covered rocky backdrop with a tweet. "Sometimes we just like a good landscape picture," they said enigmatically. If you’re familiar with the Game Pass Twitter accounts, they like to do the flippant social media thing and tease followers. Well, this latest attempt has people speculating that the Sony-trademarked Death Stranding is about to hit PC Game Pass. Read more  ( 17 min )

Tony the Tiger – the neckerchiefed mascot of Kellogg’s Frosties – is becoming a VTuber, with some kind of heavily sponsored Twitch stream scheduled for this Friday in which “he” will play “a popular battle royale game” with some other livestreamers. I’m not very interested in this, to be honest, but I am curious about the “milk-coolant PC” that Tony’s avatar will be using to get the W’s and build creepy parasocial relationships with viewers. Could such a PC, liquid-cooled by a dairy product, actually function? Read more  ( 16 min )

Recently launched sci-fantasy gacha MMO Tower Of Fantasy is trying to tackle server queues and cheats, the developers have promised. In a message posted to the official site, Tower Of Fantasy’s devs Hotta Studio say they’ve now implemented increased server caps and improved server recommendation logic for PC. There’s also a queue timer, if you find your feet tapping while you’re waiting to join. You can watch the game’s launch trailer below if you missed it last week. Read more  ( 16 min )

Miniaturised survival game Grounded doesn't have dedicated servers, but the latest update offered up for public testing contains a new feature that'll help. It's called "Shared Worlds", and it allows Grounded worlds to be stored in the cloud so that anyone that world is shared with can host the game. Read more  ( 16 min )

Techland has shared a brisk tease of Dying Light 2: Stay Human's long-awaited first story DLC, confirming it to be titled Bloody Ties - and hinting at its setting - in a tantalising new trailer. Bloody Ties - the first of two bits of story DLC so far confirmed to be on the way as part of Dying Light 2's five year journey of post-launch support - was originally expected to launch in June but Techland eventually delayed its release to September for additional development. Much is still unknown about what it'll bring, but we do have a few hints based on previous official teases. According to lead designer Tymon Smektała, for instance, it'll run "parallel to the main story" and will focus on "a specific place outside of the Villedor city limits". Read more  ( 15 min )

A fleeting Amazon listing has provided fresh details on New Tales from the Borderlands, the (newly monikered) Gearbox-developed follow-up to Telltale Games' sublime 2014 episodic adventure of almost the same name, suggesting it'll launch for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PS5, Switch, and PC on 21st October. The original Tales from the Borderlands (simultaneously both the best Borderlands title and the best Telltale game, and I'll hear no more about it) charted the genuinely funny - and, by the time it reached its fifth-episode denouement, surprisingly touching - adventures of Hyperion employee Rhys (played by Troy Baker) and Pandoran con-artist Fiona (Laura Bailey) as they attempted to locate and open one of Borderlands' legendary Vault. With developer Telltale having shut its doors in 2018 - and given the relative commercial failure of the original game - it seemed like a sequel might never come to pass. However, Borderlands developer Gearbox surprised everyone back in April when it announced that a follow-up wasn't just in the works but would be out by the end of the year. Read more  ( 15 min )

Ahead of Overwatch 2's early access launch in October, Blizzard is giving existing Overwatch players the opportunity to begin merging their various Overwatch 1 accounts as part of its preparations for the sequel's new cross-progression feature, and it's shared an FAQ on the process so players can start the transition now. Cross-progression, which was confirmed for Overwatch 2's release https://www.eurogamer.net/overwatch-2-launches-as-a-free-to-play-early-access-title-in-october, enables Overwatch players to continue their progress, and use any acquired cosmetics, across any platform using a single account. As such, those players that currently hold multiple accounts across several systems now have the opportunity to merge them into one. As of yesterday, 16th August, all players with an Overwatch account on Xbox, PlayStation, or Switch will be prompted identify, select, and confirm which accounts they want to merge next time they log into the game. This requires linking to a Battle.net account (which is mandatory for Overwatch 2 anyway) so players will need to create one, if they haven't done so previously, to compete the process. Read more  ( 15 min )

Boyfriend Dungeon's DLC has been surprise released today, just after the game's one year anniversary. The free DLC was announced back in June but without a release date. The Secret Weapons update includes a new dungeon and new dateable weapons, including Dr. Holmes the Whip designed by CEO and creative director at Unseen Inc., Ikumi Nakamura (former director of Ghostwire Tokyo). Read more  ( 15 min )

The concept album has been around for decades as a way for musicians to focus their work on a central theme. But what if the concept album was actually a video game? That's what We Are OFK is attempting to achieve, though it's not the first attempt. Björk's Biophilia album from 2011 came with an interactive app, while Sayonara Wild Hearts (2019) was a music video game that lasted as long as an album and warrants repeat plays. With We Are OFK, Team OFK has created a visual novel that contextualises an EP, detailing the story of its fictional band. And the music is set to be released officially, delivered by its anime band members Gorillaz-style. As a visual novel it offers likeable teen drama with welcome representation, but as an interactive music game it disappoints. Read more  ( 17 min )

London's latest Pokémon Center pop-up shop has been plagued by queues on its opening day - mirroring the messy situation faced by fans the last time round. Advice given to fans this afternoon - even those who previously pre-booked their slot to go shopping - is reportedly to now arrive and start queuing an hour before your expected entrance timing, Eurogamer has been told. The pop-up shop is open for four more days at London's ExCeL Centre, where Pokémon's World Championships are taking place. Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell is in attendance, and described it to me as "very busy". Read more  ( 16 min )

A new skin has been released in Call of Duty, which bears a striking resemblance to the work of former Infinity Ward employee Robert Bowling. Bowling is now studio head at Midnight Society, the developer behind the NFT-fuelled shooter Deadrop that's backed by Dr Disrespect. Art for Deadrop was revealed in July, but now a very similar looking skin called Doomsayer is available in Call of Duty Vanguard and Warzone. Read more  ( 15 min )

Untamed Isles, a Pokémon-like MMORPG with "optional" play-to-earn elements, has been placed on indefinite hiatus. The game had been set for an Early Access release date of 6th October, which will no longer be happening. "There's been a lot going on in the last 72 hours. This has been a wild rush," is how Joshua Grant, CEO of Phat Loot Studios, opened his Twitch stream on 12th August. The stream was held to address the statement that had just been published by Phat Loot, in which Untamed Isles' hiatus was announced, and to field questions from the community. Read more  ( 20 min )

Mario Kart 8 is a stunningly successful game with over 50 million copies sold across Wii U and Switch - so it's not surprising that Nintendo has returned with a content expansion for its blockbuster kart racer. Dubbed the Booster Course Pass, this expansion includes a whopping 48 courses split over six waves of course releases, with the last drop scheduled for late 2023. So far, 16 courses have been delivered but players and press alike have complained about basic layouts and graphical downgrades. At the heart of the issue is that the bulk of these tracks have been ported from Mario Kart Tour, a mobile game with simplified graphics and gameplay. So how do these new Booster Course tracks stack up - are they a good fit or is the distance from mobile just too large? While Mario Kart 8 has se…  ( 20 min )

Files relating to The Matrix have been found in MultiVersus' latest update, a reliable dataminer has claimed. The Matrix's iconic green text has been spotted lurking within Multiversus' code by AisulMV, suggesting a debut for Neo and pals may be on the cards. This would be no big surprise for MultiVersus, the Smash Bros-style brawler built on the back of Warner Bros. franchises - of which The Matrix saga is but one. Read more  ( 15 min )

EA has admitted it accidentally listed its most recent FIFA release on the Epic Games Store in India for a tiny 4.80 rupees. That is roughly 5p here in the UK. But it doesn't end there. To add insult to injury, this listing wasn't simply for the standard copy of the game. It was, in fact, for the Ultimate Edition. As noted by PC Gamer, this means those who purchased this version of the game at its mislisted price got it for a discount of 99.98 percent, as EA is honouring these purchases. Read more  ( 15 min )

Nintendo has used the Xbox adaptive controller as a starting point for its own accessibility controller. That's according to ex-Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aimé, who hopes the company was still developing the platform-agnostic controller. Xbox's controller was used "as a jumping-off point to create something that would be platform-agnostic and adaptable by any consumer," he told Inverse. Read more  ( 15 min )

A series of new images for the upcoming Fallout TV adaptation from Amazon have made their way online. These images give us a good look at some of the show's set pieces, and, dare I say it, it's all looking cautiously optimistic. This first set of images was shared by a former Bethesda employee, who goes by LoneVaultWanderer on Twitter. They show the inside of the series' vault, including a nursery, Vault 32 insignia and the Vault Boy poster warning of the outside world. Read more  ( 16 min )

A report has detailed instances of sexual harassment at Nintendo of America, and a working environment where some women - particularly contract employees without full-time employment - felt pressured into silence. The report, published by Kotaku, builds on allegations reported in the past about a divide between Nintendo's full-time and contracted staff, the latter of whom enjoy fewer perks and lack job security. Now, women who worked as contract employees have come forward to discuss some of the issues they faced in particular, such as instances of sexual harassment and unequal pay. Read more  ( 15 min )

When it comes to video game consoles, the current generation has one platform holder going all-in on tactile immersion — Sony Interactive Entertainment. No stranger to creating immersive experiences, players may recall Sony's PSVR and its PS Move controller, the DualShock 4 with its touchpad and motion control, heck, even the EyeToy Play. The current generation PS5 includes a DualSense controller that comes packed with features from the DualShock 4 and tacks on new adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. Sony has been fixated on marketing this unique controller for immersion: selling players on the experience of feeling their bow being drawn taut, or the tippy tapping of raindrops against their palms. When it comes to accessibility for disabled players, there's so much potential that lies in the existence of these intricate haptics. It feels, though, as if the focus on immersion may be seeing developers forget about providing a balance, or optional choice, of immersion and functionality. I'll jump straight into how the controller's haptics can be useful for accessibility — the adaptive triggers are a story for another day. I'm Deaf and I wear hearing aids, yet I still miss key sounds, or I fail to understand the newfangled 3D audio. The haptics could guide me with directionality, they could make me feel immersed in a world to set the scene, and they could highlight a successful puzzle completion. Additionally, they could help those who are blind or have low vision, by informing players of interactive elements, making menu navigation more tactile, and also warning of nearby dangers such as enemies or ledges. Read more  ( 18 min )

A change to the PC Game Pass Twitter profile picture has fans believing Death Stranding may be on the way. The image, behind the PC Game Pass logo, is of a rugged landscape very similar to the Icelandic-inspired hills of Death Stranding. While Kojima Production's game was published by PlayStation for console release, the PC release was published by 505 Games - the Director's Cut was released earlier this year. Read more  ( 15 min )

The powers that be at Call of Duty have announced that those who digitally preorder Modern Warfare 2 will be able to play through the game's campaign eight days before its official release. So, instead of waiting until the 28th October to flex your muscles with Captain Price and co, you will be able to get a headstart on the 20th October instead. To accompany this news, we also got a bite-size trailer for the game's campaign, which you can see below. Meanwhile, in a new post, Activision states: "This Campaign features missions in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and is set to be an incredible experience on numerous levels: offshore sieges with underwater combat, all-out explosive assaults from 30,000 feet above enemy strongholds, and high-stakes, low-profile stealth missions in both plain sight and under the cover of darkness." Read more  ( 16 min )

Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida has stated he believes the game series is "struggling" to adapt to industry trends and meet player expectations. Speaking to Inverse, Yoshida discussed the future of the series. "In terms of whether Final Fantasy is successfully adapting to industry trends, I believe the series is currently struggling," he said. Read more  ( 15 min )

Samsung's 8th Generation V-NAND memory looms to production.  ( 59 min )

A team of researchers from China managed to entangle two different quantum memories across a 12.5 km distance in an urban environment, bringing the promise of a quantum internet closer.  ( 60 min )

Tesla is growing its Ampere GPU powered AI supercomputer for now, but ultimately plans to replace the processing power with its own Dojo D1 ASICs forged on TSMC N7.  ( 59 min )

Corsair has teased its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, showing speeds of up to 10,000MB/s. Full specs and release date weren't shared, but we expect it may launch this winter.  ( 59 min )

A lucrative contract to make spaceflight processors has gone to Microchip Technology, Inc. of Arizona.  ( 59 min )

A new image of a Ryzen 7000 qualifying sample has surfaced online. The image is a shot of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 7700X 8 core CPU.  ( 59 min )

TSMC's N3 fabrication process to enter high-volume manufacturing in September.  ( 59 min )

Even technologies which could be useful to the communist party controlled military are waved through. Critics say something must change to rebalance trade vs security concerns.  ( 59 min )

We help you find RTX 3080-powered gaming laptop deals.  ( 64 min )

Both the AW2523HF and AW2723DF feature a retractable headset hanger.  ( 59 min )

Intel finally unveils its business-oriented NUC 12 Pro 'Wall Street Canyon' compact PCs.  ( 59 min )

Large Bitcoin mining companies have made large losses, but continue to take out loans and refinance.  ( 59 min )

Maurício Pessoa is using a Raspberry Pi Pico W to send alerts through Telegram when his doorbell is triggered.  ( 59 min )

The Mavix M9 chair costs $1,000, but you get what you pay for. It puts other gaming chairs to shame with its comfort and ergonomic adjustments.  ( 69 min )

The Loupedeck Live, Loupedeck CT, and Loupedeck+ consoles are excellent, highly-customizable tools for streaming, video editing, and beat-making, but the right one for you is situation-dependent.  ( 72 min )

Tachyum proposes to build a 20 exaflops supercomputer based on its Prodigy processors by 2025.  ( 60 min )

You've put 100+ hours into Vampire Survivors and now what? Spellbook Demonslayers is what and there's a free prologue available for you to try out.  ( 4 min )

Blossom Tales 2: The Minotaur Prince is a new Native Linux release from Castle Pixel and Playtonic Friends. It hasn't been Steam Deck Verified yet but works great.  ( 4 min )

Looking for some games to play on Steam Deck that are good, work well and don't cost too much? Here's a few choice picks from me to you.  ( 4 min )

Airships: Conquer the Skies is a wonderful Native Linux indie game about constructing various vehicles and conquering everything you can with them.  ( 4 min )

Not long after a bunch of changes rolled out to Preview and Beta, Valve has updated the Steam Deck Client software with various improvements.  ( 5 min )

Recently it was noticed that users on more bleeding-edge Linux distributions that updated saw Easy Anti-Cheat no longer working on Linux, the culprit was glibc and now a Valve developer has spoken out about it.  ( 8 min )

VEIKK is a company I previously hadn't heard of that offers a range of pen displays and drawing tablets for digital artists. At first when they reached out around reviewing one of their drawing tablets, I questioned their Linux support but it turns out their graphics tablets do work across all major platforms. I've been trying out the VEIKK VK1200 the past few weeks and it's been working out decent as a 11.6-inch drawing monitor for just $169 USD.  ( 4 min )

Earlier this summer I wrote about Canonical working to provide good support for StarFive's VisionFive low-cost RISC-V board. That work has now culminated with an Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS image for use on this Chinese RISC-V single board computer...  ( 5 min )

While Linux 6.0 won't be out for another month and a half, on deck already for Linux 6.1 is the AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" driver being queued into platform-drivers-x86.git...  ( 5 min )

Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller is intended for gamers with limited mobility and is intended as a control hub to making gaming more accessible. Linux support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller is being worked on...  ( 4 min )

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has started seeing support land for VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library thanks to the work of one of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers...  ( 5 min )

NVIDIA this week published JetPack 5.0.2 as their updated development environment and SDK for their Arm-powered Jetson modules and developer kits...  ( 4 min )

Canonical kernel engineer Kai-Heng Feng posted a patch on Tuesday for capable laptops to switch their external monitor connections to be routed through a laptop's discrete GPU rather than the integrated GPU. With select laptops this can be done with an ACPI call but raises questions among upstream developers rather this change is indeed desirable...  ( 5 min )

VFX Reference Platform as a standards body that aims to help standardize software platforms in the realm of digital content creation (DCC) has published a detailed report for studios to consider in choosing their next Linux platform. Their new recommendations for visual effects and animation studios about moving to newer Linux distributions over the next year -- especially with many still relying on CentOS 7 -- is for moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 otherwise one of the downstreams like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Close behind in their recommendations and as a longer-term objective is also tossing some support behind Ubuntu Linux...  ( 6 min )

Från "överraskande bra" till "Bloodbornes korkade kusin".  ( 6 min )

Ett perfekt sätt att ha stabil tillgång till färskt blod.  ( 6 min )

I september återvänder vi till Arcadia Bay.  ( 6 min )

Viktigt att välja rätt konto.  ( 6 min )

Mod byter 2d-sprites mot 3d-voxlar.  ( 6 min )

Vault 32 har hamnat på bild.  ( 6 min )

Blood for the Blood God släpps samtidigt som betan för Immortal Empires.  ( 7 min )

Flipp, flopp eller mittemellan? Rösta!  ( 6 min )

Den tionde (!) förseningen vi rapporterar om i augusti.  ( 7 min )

Lira upp till en vecka innan resten av spelet släpps.  ( 6 min )

Trots att Sony äger varumärket.  ( 6 min )

Sony verkar ha stora pc-planer.  ( 6 min )

Och spelarna ställer sig frågande till tilltaget.  ( 6 min )

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic  ( 5 min )

Images of Amazon's Fallout production set have leaked online. The images are said to have come from the in-production Fallout TV series in development for Amazon and appear to show the interior of Vault 32. Originally posted to the Fallout subreddit before being deleted, the images show a nursery, conference room, a delapidated farm, and a Vault Boy poster (thanks, RPS). Read more  ( 15 min )

Bungie has released a teaser ahead of its Destiny 2 showcase scheduled for next week. You can check out the teaser below that takes a quick glimpse back at some of 2022’s best moments. On Tuesday, August 23, Bungie will stream its Destiny 2 Showcase and unveil the next expansion in the Light and Darkness saga: Lightfall. Read more  ( 15 min )

The first story DLC for Dying Light 2, Bloody Ties, will debut in a world premiere trailer at gamescom Opening Night Live on August 23. You can catch a teaser for the upcoming trailer below that offers a glimpse at the dangers lurking in Carnage Hall. Originally set to release earlier this year, Bloody Ties was moved into September so that Techland could give the DLC the "absolute highest level of polish" to meet players' expectations. Read more  ( 15 min )

The lovely cinematic puzzle adventure Planet of Lana will miss its planned 2022 release and will instead arrive during spring 2023. According to publisher Thunderful and independent studio Wishfully, the delay will provide the development team with extra time to ensure the game meets its full potential. "We’re sorry that completing development on Planet of Lana will take longer than initially expected, but we promise it will be worth the wait,” said Wishfully director Adam Stjarnljus. Read more  ( 15 min )

Overwatch players can now merge multiple accounts to carry progression and in-game cosmetics over to Overwatch 2 on a single profile. If you have a linked console account, you will be prompted at login to "identify, select, and confirm" the accounts you want to merge. Once approved, Blizzard will prepare your accounts to be merged during the release of Overwatch 2. The platforms included in account merge are Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Read more  ( 15 min )

It is honestly a really good time to be a fan of fighting games. Guilty Gear is good, there’s a new Smash alternative in Multiversus, there’s probably a new Netherrealm game on the horizon, there’s definitely a new Tekken coming, and Street Fighter 6 is well and truly on the way, in the thick of what’ll presumably be a relentless promotion cycle over the next nine months or so. There’s a lot of reasons to be excited for Street Fighter 6 in particular, too. For starters, Capcom’s fighting game unit is under new management, and the core creatives in charge of SF6 are the same guys who dragged Street Fighter 5 out of the gutter and ultimately made it a high quality and shockingly well-balanced game in its final seasons. It also looks really nice – in my opinion the best-looking 3D Street Fighter to date – thanks to both shrewd art direction and Capcom’s brilliant RE Engine technology. But one other thing I’m excited about based on what we know of the game so far is that it appears to be continuing a Street Fighter tradition - ducking the modern fighting game trend of guest characters. Read more  ( 18 min )

Tower of Fantasy seemed to ignite in hype and popularity overnight, right? Sure, those invested in this particular brand of RPG may have been aware of its arrival for some time, but who could have expected it to capture so much attention — to become the topic of conversation in gaming spaces. Off the back of this hype, I jumped in eager to see what’s going on among thousands of other like-minded folks. While initially great, the heat and hype radiating off Tower of Fantasy whittles away quickly. It’s a flashfire, catching your eye at first before smoldering to a quick and disappointing conclusion, burning up your time (and perhaps your wallet) in that fleeting moment. But what is Tower of Fantasy? First off, it’s not a brand-new game by any means. Released in China some time ago, the action-RPG has now been released globally for both mobile platforms and PC. It falls into the category of ‘ever expanding and ludicrously profitable open world Gacha ARPG’, a genre currently dominated by Genshin Impact in the west and with more and more titles with shared DNA trickling over. Read more  ( 22 min )

Old School RuneScape fans have something new to look forward too later this month, as a brand new raid is coming to the game on August 24. Called the Tombs of Amascut, players will have to delve deep into a fresh new environment for new loot including powerful weapons and armour. If you’re not at the pinnacle of OSRS progression, there’s no need to worry since the Tombs of Amascut features an invocation system that allows you to adjust the difficulty of different elements of the raid. These come in the forms of buffs and debuffs that alter that challenge you can expect to run into. This raid continues the story established in the Beneath Cursed Sands quest, and has players venture below the desert to stop Amascut’s nefarious plans. The raid itself is split into four main sections which can be completed in any order players choose, with each having its own unique puzzles and/or combat challenges. Read more  ( 15 min )

SUPER PEOPLE’s beta testing phase is drawing to a close, but ahead of the game’s general launch, there’s one last push from developer Wonder People to show the world at large what this new-fangled battle royale is all about before its full launch. That said, a lot of people will already be familiar with one of Korea’s hottest battle royale experiments: over 4 million people have played the game so far, and every new beta session has seen user numbers spike. But what is it that continues to draw people in – especially in a world where there’s so much competition in the genre? Director Seong-Gon Park from Wonder People explains. “From the time we first introduced SUPER PEOPLE, our core fun factor was clear,” they explain. “Although it is a battle royale, the fun of building up is clear due to the character and equipment growth factors. You can create your own strategies through super skills, and a variety of battles are produced rather than the same battle pattern. And even if you’re at a disadvantage, chances for reversal are always available.” Read more  ( 17 min )

Grounded is the charming survival game that has remained in Early Access for a while now. Although, not for much longer, with the game slated to release on September 27 of this year. In the meantime, Obsidian is not neglecting updates for the game, with the latest change to be introduced involving Shared Worlds. The adventure itself sees takes Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and turns it into a video game. As a pint-sized version of your former self, you must navigate blades of grass and spar with unfriendly insects to get by. While the game is certainly fun to play solo, it reaches its full potential when played co-operatively with friends. That said, multiplayer can be relatively troublesome. Previously, co-op required one player - the host - to be online for anyone to play on that chosen world. Every time someone wanted to play, the host would need to be around. Now, obviously not everyone has the same schedules, and this can pose an issue. Read more  ( 16 min )

Evil West, one of the few games we were counting on playing next month, has been pushed back by two months. The game will now be released on November 22. It's also been a little over two months since Evil Was was given a September release date, so we're hoping this is the last of its delays, because late November/early December release dates have a tendency to turn into Q1 of the following year. Publisher Focus Entertainment broke the news on Twitter in a joint statement with developer Flying Wild Hog. The statement explains that because the game is coming out on five platforms spanning two console generations (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S), more time was simply needed to ensure the experience is polished on all of them. Read more  ( 15 min )

Last night, the official PC Game Pass Twitter account made a change to its social media profile that has set tongues wagging and made everyone a little bit dubious about what the hell is going on. The account, with a message that said “sometimes we just like a good landscape picture #newprofilepic” leads you to look at the new icon – which has a landscape seemingly reminiscent of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding. If you click through to the picture and look beyond the Game Pass branding, you'll clock a landscape that looks quite a lot like the Icelandic-inspired landscapes you'll see in Kojima's latest sci-fi epic. The tweet below, for example, highlights some of the similarities to the image and what you'll see in the PlayStation and PC-only game. Read more  ( 17 min )

En rapport för årets andra kvartal visar att försäljningen av hårddiskar minskar. Samtidigt är den levererade lagringskapaciteten stabil.  ( 5 min )

Det är dags att rösta fram vinnarbilderna i Samsungs tävling. Dyk in i omröstning och uppfylls av sommarkänslor.  ( 6 min )

Calle och Jonas tar en titt på Fractal Designs nylanserade "budgetchassi" Focus 2, där modellens nedskalade utförande inte riktigt stämmer överens med prislappen.  ( 5 min )

Logitech vill förbättra ljudupplevelsen för användare av VR-headsetet Quest 2 genom att lansera hörlurstillbehöret Chorus.  ( 5 min )

Indikationer om att Sony har en Playstation-launcher på gång till PC har hittats i samband med nya Spider-Man Remastered.  ( 6 min )

Indikationer om att Sony har en Playstation-launcher på gång till PC har hittats i samband med nya Spider-Man Remastered.  ( 5 min )

Är du en skrytmåns och har din dator på en piedestal, eller är datormaskinen gömd långt in under skrivbordet? I veckans fråga undrar vi kort och gott var du har din dator.  ( 5 min )

Lumina Desk ger användare mer skärmyta tack vare en inbyggd OLED-panel på 24 tum.  ( 6 min )

After I wrote hledger, I got some good feedback, both from a friend in-person and also on Twitter. My in-person friend asked, frankly, do I really try to manage money like this: tracking every single expense? Which affirms my suspicion, that many people don't, and that it perhaps isn't essential to do so. Combined with the details below, 3/4 of the way through my experiment with using hledger, I'm not convinced that it has been a good idea. I'm quoting my Twitter feedback here in order to respond. The context is handling when I have used the "wrong" card to pay for something: a card affiliated with my family expenses for something personal, or vice versa. With double-entry book-keeping, and one pair of transactions, the destination account can either record the expense category: 2022-08-20…  ( 2 min )

This is the description. Oh Oh yea, the link https://patreon.com/shencomix  ( 2 min )

The apt-get upgrade and dist-upgrade are both used for upgrading the installed packages. So, what's the difference?  ( 24 min )

Curious to know the latest market share percentage for Linux desktop? You don't have to do the research, we've done it for you.  ( 23 min )

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There are references to a "PlayStation PC launcher" within files for Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered's PC release, which launched last week. As spotted by VGC, the mention suggests Sony could launch their own bespoke game launcher on PC and allow players to link PC games to PlayStation Network accounts. Read more  ( 15 min )

Airborne Kingdom, the chill citybuilder about constructing a city in the sky, is getting a free bit of DLC. Coming this September, Airborne Kingdom: The Lost Tundra will float your urban sprawl above an icy wasteland, and challenge you to keep your city flying in a biome which lacks food and water while your machinery freezes. Read more  ( 16 min )

Evil West, Flying Wild Hog's third-person shooter about a vampire-hunting cowboy, has been delayed from its September release plans. If you're desperate to complete the unofficial trilogy of "____ West" games in 2022, then you're still in luck: Evil West will follow in Weird West and Hard West 2's cowboy boots by launching on November 22nd. Read more  ( 16 min )

It's taken mere days since the release of Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC for players to crack open the game and noodle with its insides. Thus far the result is a slew of reskin mods which let you replace Spidey with other characters and play while looking like Kingpin, Miles Morales, Mary Jane, or - as pictured above - Stan Lee. Read more  ( 16 min )

Earlier today we looked at a deal on AMD's top graphics card, the RX 6950 XT, and now it's time to look at the opposite end of the market: one of Nvidia's cheapest RTX graphics cards. Ebay is running a promotion today that knocks 15% off the price of brand-new items when you use the code BANK15 at the checkout, and you can use this to pick an RTX 3060 12GB for just £279. This is a great price for this mid-range GPU, and it's especially rare to see features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and DLSS image reconstruction at this price point. Read more  ( 16 min )

Yesterday we took a look at the massive price drops affecting flagship Nvidia RTX graphics cards, and now it's time to see the best deal going on AMD's best and brightest. As RPS reader Skiddywinks points out, you can pick up the Radeon RX 6950 XT for £850 at Scan right now - about £200 cheaper than its UK RRP. Read more  ( 16 min )

Microsoft have laid out their PC Game Pass plans for the second half of August, adding another eight games to the subscription service across the remaining weeks then removing eight at the end of the month. Additions include Zachtronics hacking game Exapunks and Ubisoft's child-friendly open world 'em up Immortals Fenyx Rising. Alas, games going include the wonderfully sad What Remains Of Edith Finch and wonderfully wonderful Hades. Read more  ( 18 min )

Ambitious single-server sandbox MMO Dual Universe is setting course onto Steam on September 27th, after spending eight years in development hypersleep. For the past two years, the interstellar RPG has been in beta. There’s a two-week free trial planned for people who’ve played the game before, and Steam players will be able to have a go for free too, just on a different server. Get a glimpse of what’s been happening in the two-year-long beta in the trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture devs The Chinese Room are bringing their postponed cosmonaut adventure Little Orpheus to PC on September 13th. The game had originally been due to launch on March 1st but was delayed. Little Orpheus stars a Soviet Russian character, and the devs wanted to review its content before release out of sensitivity to the conflict in Ukraine. Check out the trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

Long-running fantasy MMORPG Guild Wars 2 will hop onto Steam on August 23rd, not quite ten years to the day since it launched in August 2012. Can you even remember what you were doing then? I was getting my wedding organised. Have a watch of the announcement trailer below. For Guild Wars 2 coming to Steam, not my wedding. We just didn’t have that kind of budget. Read more  ( 16 min )

Excellent roguelikelike dungeon crawler Backpack Hero launched into early access this week, and it's absolutely worth a go if you enjoy shuffle items around your inventory grid. Backpack Hero is all about arranging weapons and items inside your massive sack to develop powerful synergies, see. Some items buff items touching them, while others benefit from empty spaces, or some insist upon being in a certain grid row, and some even move around by themselves. The buildcrafting gets fiendishly fun as your critter delves deeper into dungeons in search of a giant hunk of cheese. Read more  ( 18 min )

Unity Software have chosen to reject a $17.54 billion (£14.58 billion) all-stock takeover offer from mobile gaming technology company AppLovin to instead pursue their own planned merger with AppLovin’s rival ironSource. Unity’s board of directors unanimously cast aside the AppLovin offer, which hadn’t been sought by the game engine company, after a “thorough financial and strategic evaluation”. The board has recommended that shareholders vote against AppLovin’s offer. Read more  ( 16 min )

Disney and Marvel have revealed they’ll be hosting a joint games showcase for the first time during this year’s D23 Expo. The in-person and digital showcase starts at 1pm PST/4pm EST/9pm BST on September 9th. Have a watch of the very concise trailer below to get an idea of what’s being shown at the event. Read more  ( 17 min )

18 people and businesses charged, one giant web of connections America's financial watchdog has accused 18 individuals and shell companies of using compromised brokerage accounts to manipulate stock prices to rake in $1.3 million in illicit profits.…  ( 6 min )

Big Blue certainly seems blue about letting any of these claims go to trial IBM has settled the age-discrimination case brought against it by the widow of a sales executives who took his own life after being laid off.…  ( 5 min )

You'll need a new motherboard, RAM, beefier PSU. But hey, at least GPUs are cheap again AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series microprocessors will officially launch later this month during the company’s “together we advance PC” virtual event, where CEO Lisa Su and CTO Mark Papermaster will showcase the chipmaker’s Zen 4-based CPU cores.…  ( 6 min )

Mandate starts in September, staff say its about 'fear of worker autonomy' Apple has told its workforce they must come into the office for at least three days a week from September to get back to "in-person collaboration."…  ( 4 min )

For when a GCP Local SSD is just not quite reliable enough Chat platform Discord delivered a playful slap to Google yesterday with a post describing how the company dealt with "reliability issues" to achieve some impressively low latency.…  ( 5 min )

Two different kinds of fraud, says judge while throwing out lawsuit against insurer A Minnesota computer store suing its crime insurance provider has had its case dismissed, with the courts saying it was a clear instance of social engineering, a crime for which the insurer was only liable to cover a fraction of total losses.…  ( 6 min )

Still waiting for 22H2? Have a 21H2 release preview to tide you over Remember 2021? Microsoft does, and has emitted a fresh build to the Windows Insider Release Preview channel for Windows 10 21H2, with a few useful fixes, including one where Edge will stop responding when Internet Explorer mode is on.…  ( 5 min )

Samsung, SK hynix, Micron benefit most but there are signs that pricing and shipment growth are weakening The DRAM industry saw an increase in revenue for the second quarter of 2022 as some suppliers managed to expand the total bits shipped, but the PC and mobile markets weakened in response to inflation, while the server memory market continued to hold up.…  ( 5 min )

A boon for administrators having to deal with Apple hardware while also keeping everything secure Microsoft Defender for Endpoint's Tamper Protection in macOS has entered general availability.…  ( 5 min )

Double the bandwidth of previous gen and 6x reduction in power consumption Broadcom says it has doubled the capacity of its merchant switch silicon with the launch of the 51.2Tbps Tomahawk5 ASIC this week.…  ( 5 min )

Bad guy also got SMS verification codes, and re-registered one of the numbers they searched for The security breach at Twilio earlier this month affected at least one high-value customer, Signal, and led to the exposure of the phone number and SMS registration codes for 1,900 users of the encrypted messaging service, it confirmed.…  ( 5 min )

Japanese Hayabusa-2 probe samples reveal coarse-grained phyllosilicates that may have served as 'cradles' for organics and water Scientists examining samples from the asteroid Ryugu retrieved by the Japanese Hayabusa-2 probe have concluded that Ryugu is a drifter from the outer solar system.…  ( 5 min )

Opening was delayed during that pandemic thing Microsoft Azure launched a long-awaited new cloud region in Doha, Qatar, on Monday.…  ( 4 min )

Seaborgium targeted dozens of orgs this year alone Microsoft said it disabled accounts used by Russian-linked Seaborgium troupe to phish and steal credentials from its customers as part of the cybercrime gang's illicit spying and data-stealing activities.…  ( 6 min )

Let's hope DALAS procurement is a tad more sensible than its soap opera namesake The UK government's commercial wing has begun to set up a contracting agreement set to be worth up to £4.5 billion ($5.4 billion) for application software services supporting the nation's tax collector.…  ( 5 min )

Industry set to readjust to new realities of raising cash The second quarter of 2022 has seen more than nine times the number of layoffs from tech startups than the first, according to industry figures.…  ( 4 min )

Did someone say ECC on an SBC? That Raspberry Pi 4B feeling a bit pokey? Asus' Aaeon division has managed to fit an eight-core Xeon processor, complete with error correcting memory (ECC) support, and a PCIe 4.0 x8 slot into a four-inch single board computer.…  ( 5 min )

Education Department planned to buy 70,000 laptops, blew its budget and bought just 40,000 When COVID-19 closed schools in The Philippines, the nation’s government acted to ensure its teachers had the kit they needed to keep working by allocating funds to acquire nearly 70,000 laptops.…  ( 4 min )

Superconductive hybrid magnet claimed to be 4,500 times stronger than a fridge stick-on Chinese scientists claim to have broken the record for producing the strongest steady magnetic field, one that's at least a million times more powerful than planet Earth's, using a superconducting system. …  ( 6 min )

Scorching weather sees scarce juice diverted to aircon instead of laptops and lithium A heatwave in China has disrupted operations at laptop component makers and assemblers in Sichuan province and the municipality of Chongqing this week, creating the possibility of further problems in tech supply chains.…  ( 5 min )

Somebody went after crypto-centric companies’ outsourced email but the damage was felt in the cloud Junior cloud Digital Ocean has revealed that some of its clients’ email addresses were exposed to attackers, thanks to an attack on email marketing service Mailchimp.…  ( 5 min )

OceanBase 4.0 is derived from tech behind Alipay and is MySQL compatible Ant Group, the financial services company spun out of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, has created a database it's claiming is a speedy and scalable alternative to MySQL, and will soon market it widely in China and beyond.…  ( 4 min )

Always look on the bright (oh God, they are so bright) side of life The US Air Force is giving $1.9 million to SpaceX to test if Starlink can support military bases in Europe and Africa.…  ( 4 min )

Let alone the ones with 123456 to login. How sophisticated do attackers really need to be? Thousands of machines on the public internet can be remotely controlled via VNC without any authentication, a cybersecurity vendor has reminded us this month.…  ( 6 min )

Corn-y demo heralded as right-to-repair win At DEF CON 30 on Saturday, an Australian who goes by the handle Sick Codes showed off a way to fully take control of some John Deere farming machine electronics to run first-person shooter Doom.…  ( 6 min )

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Landmark stones recorded low-water levels during droughts to warn future generations.  ( 7 min )

NoA full-timers accused of "using the tester pool of associates as a dating pool."  ( 5 min )

Some streamers report multiple swatting attempts weekly.  ( 6 min )

The best-selling console has sat at $299.99 for an unprecedented five-plus years.  ( 6 min )

22H2 includes security upgrades, redesigned Task Manager, and other refinements.  ( 5 min )

Twitter must produce documents from a fired executive—but Musk wanted a lot more.  ( 5 min )

Anti-rollback enforcement disables downgrades for Google's latest devices.  ( 5 min )

What looks like Google's next mesh Wi-Fi router could offer better backhaul.  ( 5 min )

Keyboards build on Drop's November release of LotR keycap sets.  ( 6 min )

Bandwidth was set aside in 1999, but V2X has been an abject failure.  ( 5 min )

You and the trillions of microbes in your gut can live in harmony.  ( 5 min )

Test comes after delays due to Russia, China tensions.  ( 5 min )

We killed the last thylacine about a century ago. Can we correct that mistake?  ( 7 min )

Despite quality typing, power users may want more features.  ( 6 min )

Retail giant hits out at US regulator’s tactics in probe into Prime memberships.  ( 5 min )

“The world is beautiful and horrible, at exactly the same time…”  ( 5 min )

TeleTracking, which has personal ties to Trump, made over $50M in federal contracts.  ( 6 min )

Workers allege that casteism influences how companies hire and promote talent.  ( 6 min )

Beta dates for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 have been announced, along with when we'll get a look at the multiplayer campaign. First, let's start with information on the tester, which will be split into two playable weekends. The dates and prerequisites are a bit different for each platform, so pay close attention to the information below. Read more  ( 16 min )

A new leak suggests that announcer packs for the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and Beetlejuice are coming to MultiVersus. The leak comes from a datamine, so neither character is confirmed, but voice lines found in the mine seem to indicate the Wicked Witch will be an announcer and that Beetlejuice will be conversing with her. MultiVersus leaker AisulMV posted clips of the lines earlier this week, but the Beetlejuice lines were taken off Twitter due to a copyright claim (thanks, Polygon). Read more  ( 15 min )

The latest titles to come to Xbox Game Pass have been announced, and while there's some good titles on the way, it's also that time of the month again where we commiserate the great games that are soon to be leaving. Amongst the titles leaving is NBA 2K22, Two Point Hospital, and Elite: Dangerous. So, I've bad news for both avid space explorers, basketball pros, and hospital managers alike, as all three will be bidding farewell to Xbox Games Pass on August 31. This isn't all, either. There's truly a cracking line-up of titles leaving in just a couple of weeks, which consists of a few quaint but enjoyable indie titles. These include Spiritfarer, Twelve Minutes, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Signs of the Sojourner. Read more  ( 17 min )

Check out this rather interesting story trailer for Saints Row. The video gives you a taste of the Saints' formation, rivals, and rise to power. It also features all sorts of explosions. Set in Santo Ileso, a brand new location located in the American Southwest, the reboot stars a group of friends who embark on a criminal venture in a bid to become Self Made. Read more  ( 15 min )

The LEGO Group and Thunderful have announced platforms and a release window for the upcoming adventure game LEGO Bricktales. In development with Clockstone, the studio that brought you Bridge Constructor, the game finds you traveling across a range of diorama biomes built from LEGO bricks. The new digital adventure features a storyline and five LEGO-themed biomes such as a jungle, desert, a busy city corner, a medieval castle, and a tropical Caribbean island full of secrets and interesting characters. Read more  ( 15 min )

OverBorder Studio's first project is one that may be biting off more than it can chew. Thymesia is a Souls-like inspired mainly by Bloodborne, with a few hints of Sekiro thrown in for good measure. The indie game arrives this Thursday, August 18, but is it worth playing? Well, that's what we hope this story will answer. As we like to do, we've rounded up all of the review scores from games media to help you make a decision. Thymesia is a challenging game of deflects, dodges and a Plague mechanic that wants you to keep up the pressure. Attacking enemies in Thymesia only wounds them, befitting the plague doctor theme. To truly kill an enemy, you must capitalise on the advantage, turning temporary wounds into permanent damage. Read more

NFL Blitz, one of the best sporting video games ever created, is finally making a comeback in a remastered form thanks to the home arcade company Arcade1Up – marking the first new entry in the wider Blitz franchise since 2012, and the first re-release of the 90s classics since 2001. Blitz really is something special. I suspect some of the readers of VG247 may not have even been alive when these games first released, but they’re basically the ultimate in arcade sports, alongside NBA Jam (which happens to have been headed up by some of the same development staff). In short, Blitz takes the sport of American Football and dials everything up to 11 – making it faster, sillier, and more full-on. It was designed to provoke intense competition between friends in the arcade. And also, of course, drain you of your coins. There were a few iterations in arcades and on console between 1997 and 2001, but later entries lost much of what made the originals special. Read more  ( 18 min )

You probably don't need me to tell you that Reindog is quietly one of the best support class characters in MultiVersus, do you? Between his tether that just piles on the damage to anyone caught in the middle and his control of the battlefield with tricky little projectiles, he's a half-reindeer, half-canine force to be reckoned with. So, to that end, you want to make him look the part whenever you use him. Luckily for you, as of August 23, you'll be able to claim a free in-game MVP Pack that features the Battle Reindog variant (which sees the adorable hybrid animal don armour and a little neckerchief) as well as the Waterfall Banner, and the Dark Matter Ringout Effect. This pack was previously excluisve to PS+ users over on the PlayStation side of things, but it seems as we've moved from July to August, the freebie has flipped platforms, too. Read more  ( 16 min )

Microsoft has announced the next batch of titles coming to Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. Titles include Immortality, Tinykin, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Coffee Talk, Commandos 3 - HD Remaster and more. First up is today's release of Coffee Talk, the coffee brewing and talking simulator we told you about earlier. Read more  ( 17 min )

Guild Wars 2 is a free-to-play MMORPG that you’ve no doubt already heard of. First released back in 2012 and privy to plenty of expansions since, it has been announced that the game will be coming to Steam on August 23. This is the first time that Guild Wars 2 has been made available on a third-party platform, and a new Steam trailer has been made available for the launch. Those who use Steam will be able to jump into the fantasy-fuelled MMORPG as of next week, August 23, without the need to spend a penny or start a new subscription; something that Guild Wars 2 appears to pride itself in. Read more  ( 15 min )

A joint showcase between Disney and Marvel will be held during the D23 Expo on Friday, September 9. During the digital showcase, you can expect to see new content from Disney and Pixar Games, Marvel Games, Lucasfilm Games, and 20th Century Games. In addition to all-new announcements, the showcase will feature reveals from titles including Disney Dreamlight Valley, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and a sneak peek at the upcoming Marvel ensemble game from Skydance New Media. Read more  ( 15 min )

It’s not hard to find something to like about Thymesia, the new souls-like from OverBorder Studio. Your overall feelings on the game, however, will be dictated by how much you end up enjoying its best qualities. Thymesia is a Souls-like action RPG set in a Bloodborne-esque world whose people sought to better their lives through chemistry alchemy. Only, instead of using it sparingly, their unbridled reliance on it left their kingdom in ruins. You play as Corvus, an amnesiac plague doctor of sorts, who may have had a hand in the creation of a concoction that could save the kingdom, and put an end to experimentation with alchemy. But his memory of the ingredients is shaky, so you go around the game’s three main zones in search of – effectively – lore that helps you piece it all together, and hopefully arrive at the right formula. Read more  ( 21 min )

Fortnite is getting a hefty power level increase today, as the Dragon Ball crossover event has started. This limited time promotion adds Goku, Vegeta, Beerus and Bulma to the game, as well as a variety of exclusive challenges, activities, and rewards for those who jump in. This event has already kicked off and continues until August 30, at which point the quests and Dragon Ball themed content will be phased out. The first thing you’ll notice when booting up Fortnite is a new Power Unleashed tab - this is a power metre that you can push higher and higher by completing a set of limited challenges available for the duration of the event. Filling this up will grant exclusive Dragon Ball cosmetics for you to collect, and completing them all will earn you the Shenron Glider! Read more  ( 16 min )

If you're attentive enough, you'll have noticed that the game has graced the Xbox services before – it was one of the games that came free with your subscription back in June 2020. It's a similar game to the sublime VA11 Hall-A, if you've ever played that. The game sells itself as a "late-night café game" set in a sorta sci-fi version of Seattle – but it comes with a twist: the city is populated by orcs, humans, elves and other assorted mythical creatures. The game weaves in and out of the barista experience, casting you as both a coffee expert, and a friendly ear for the human and inhuman residents of the alt-reality city. Set against an aural backdrop of lo-fi beats, and brimming with cosy and incessently pleasant converastions, the game celebrates making you a mute observer, looking in on the lives of many people coming and going from your humble store. Read more  ( 16 min )

A new report has come in detailing a 15% drop in hard drive sales volume for the past quarter, thanks to weakened demand in the consumer market.  ( 59 min )

AMD X670E-based AM5 motherboards from Asus listed, ready for next-generation Ryzen 7000-series processors and starting at $670.  ( 59 min )

The Chinese supercomputer OceanLight has just made it into the top five finalists in the Gordon Bell prize, steadfastly facing the premier US Frontier exascale supercomputer.  ( 59 min )

Prolific robotics firm releases first robot with two programmable arms.  ( 59 min )

Intel's Arc A380 is no longer locked behind Chinese borders, with the GPU now apparently shipping to the United States.  ( 59 min )

Samsung’s curvy big “personal gaming theater” offers thrilling features like cockpit mode, sound dome technology, a remote dial OSD controller, and a $3,499 price tag.  ( 63 min )

Nvidia’s Ampere graphics cards are reportedly set to get cheaper in the coming weeks, ahead of the Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series launch.  ( 60 min )

The MacTigr is a low-profile wired mechanical keyboard designed specifically for Mac users.  ( 62 min )

A new 7-Zip benchmark result reveals a 60% performance improvement for the 13900K in decompression tests, and 20% in compression tests in comparison to the 12900K.  ( 59 min )

The event has been dubbed “Together We Advance PCs,” and you can expect a fairly deep dive into Zen 4 and AM5 platform advances and what they will mean to PC enthusiasts and DIYers.  ( 59 min )

Grgo Mariani has created a pocket-sized gaming console using the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller as its main processor.  ( 62 min )

ASRock’s Z690 Extreme WiFi is a well-rounded option in the crowded $200 space. It offers three M.2 sockets, eight SATA ports, dual Ethernet ports, integrated Wi-Fi 6E, and a quality last-gen audio codec. The all-black look and bright RGB lightning help the Extreme stand out inside your chassis.  ( 68 min )

Valve has today released Proton 7.0-4 after a short period in public testing, this brings further compatibility of Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.  ( 4 min )

Across the Obelisk is a fantastic deck-builder that just left Early Access, as the first game under Paradox Interactive's new publishing label Paradox Arc.  ( 4 min )

Titan Shell is an in-development twin-stick shooter from Meatbag Studio that blends in features from roguelikes / rogue-lites to offer a pretty interesting experience not many such shooters give you.  ( 4 min )

Axiom Verge 2 from Thomas Happ Games has jumped over from the Epic Store to Steam and it comes with Native Linux support and it is also Steam Deck Verified!  ( 4 min )

Love your cute and colourful little adventures? Dreamed Away from Nicolas Petton / Pineapple Works looks like it's worth keeping an eye on.  ( 4 min )

Backpack Hero is a dungeon crawling roguelike where you need to constantly sort out your small backpack and it's absolutely sucked me in.  ( 5 min )

ChimeraOS continues to improve the couch-gaming experience for Linux with ChimeraOS 34 out now and there's quite a number of improvements and fixes.  ( 4 min )

It seems Valve has made it easier to claim free stuff on the Steam store, so you no longer need to quickly try to install something free and back out of it to claim it.  ( 4 min )

Valve has put out a small upgrade for the Steam Deck in the Beta and Preview channels that seeks to improve the offline mode.  ( 4 min )

Evil West, the vampire-tinged cowboy shooter from Shadow Warrior reboot developer Flying Wild Hogs, has been delayed again, and is now scheduled to launch on 22nd November. Announced back in 2020, Evil West follows the gunslinging adventures of Jesse Rentier as he prowls the American frontier in search of vampiric monstrosities to destroy. It all unfolds in classic third-person action style, and is playable either co-operatively with a friend or solo. Previously, Evil West was due to launch on 20th September (and before that late 2021), but a Twitter statement shared by Focus Entertainment today explained the publisher and Flying Wild Hogs have made the decision to shift the game's release back to November in order to "ensure [it] reaches its full potential". Read more  ( 15 min )

After a lengthy delay, Square Enix's two-game Life is Strange remaster bundle finally has a release date on Switch, and will be launching on 27th September. Square's new Switch bundle - which goes by the name Life is Strange: Arcadia Bay Collection, rather than the Remastered Collection moniker used on other platforms - includes remastered versions of developer Don't Nod's much-loved original Life is Strange and its Deck-Nine-developed prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm. This new collection - which was originally due to launch on 1st February alongside other platforms before recieving a last-minute delay - retains the same acclaimed narrative core as the originals, following the supernaturally imbued adventures of teenage friends Max and Chloe, but promises a range of enhancements on Switch. Read more  ( 15 min )

Since its release last week, fans have been diving into the files of Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered. It has turned out some interesting stuff, such as a potential scrapped multiplayer mode for the game. Most recently, however, dataminers have found evidence that Sony is looking into releasing its own PC launcher in the future (via VGC), with references to such a project being tucked away inside Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered. While this has not been officially confirmed, it does tie in with other speculation across the web. Earlier in the year, a job listing for PlayStation was advertised, with the company looking for a "director, product management - PC game experiences". Read more  ( 16 min )

After a pretty dismal launch in 2020 that was widely panned by gamers and critics alike, French studio Tower Five has been hard at work remaking the XIII remake. Now, we have been given a look at some of the new gameplay for the cel-shaded shooter, which shows over three minutes of footage from the SPADS Military Base sequence. And, in my opinion, it certainly looks better. You can see it for yourself below. Read more  ( 15 min )

It's time for another wave of Xbox Game Pass games! Out today on cloud, console and PC is Coffee Talk, a coffee-brewing and heart-to-heart talking simulator set in an alternative Seattle. Next week, on 23rd August, cloud, console and PC get Midnight Fight Express, a "brutal and hyper-kinetic brawling ballet". That's one of those day-one Game Pass releases - more of those to come. Read more  ( 15 min )

Is it possible to quantify cool? Rollerdrome, the latest from the skatemasters of Roll7, certainly thinks so. Skating games have always had scores, and have always had that essential breezy nonchalance at their heart, but Rollerdrome feels like the first to really make the coolness so explicit. This is a game where, locked into a series of retrofuture colosseums, you chain elaborate roller skate tricks while dodging rockets, ducking batons and pounding shotgun pellets into riot shields in ultra-slow motion. Coolness is something that evaporates as soon as you say it out loud, so of course it's never mentioned, but the end-of-round score could be for nothing else. Mark me down as a square, though, because I am pretty terrible at Rollerdrome, despite its efforts to convince me otherwise.…  ( 18 min )

Long-running MMO Guild Wars 2 finally hits Steam on 23rd August. The Steam launch marks the first time ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2, which launched a decade ago on 28th August 2012, is available on a third-party platform. Players on both Steam and the NCSoft first-party Guild Wars 2 client will be able to play together on the same servers, NCSoft confirmed. Read more  ( 15 min )

The idyllic, peaceful city builder Townscaper will make its way to VR in October. From 6th October, the game will be available on Meta Quest VR and PICO headsets. A trailer below shows the VR version in action. Read more  ( 14 min )

The gorgeous Lego Bricktales comes out on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and PC during the fourth quarter of 2022 (Oct-Dec). Lego Bricktales is a diorama-based construction puzzler from ClockStone, the maker of the popular Bridge Constructor series. You journey across five different LEGO-themed biomes and use a brick-by-brick building mechanic to solve puzzles. Expect plenty of physics-based puzzles, such as building cranes and gyrocopters. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new and long-awaited feature for Grounded has been revealed by developer Obsidian. This feature, known as 'Shared World', allows players to create and "own" up to three shared worlds (hence the name) which will then be stored in the cloud. These can then be shared with friends and family to enable them to host that world "while you are not online". In turn, each player can also have up to 50 worlds shared with them at any given time. In addition to this, Obsidian states that any player's standard worlds can be changed to a shared world if they wish. This is done through the game's save and load menu. Read more  ( 15 min )

Yesterday, Gremlins antagonist Stripe and DC's Black Adam leaked ahead of their official reveal by Warner Bros. as coming to MultiVersus' eclectic roster. Well, now we have another leak, and it appears that more unexpected characters will also be joining the brawler further down the road, with voice lines for both The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West and BeetleJuice being found in the game's files. As shared by MultiVersus Twitter user AisulMV (the same leaker who discovered hints about a potential feature which will allow players to share their battle pass progress), the lines of dialogue found appear to be setting MultiVersus up for a spooky season. Read more  ( 15 min )

It's something of an industry joke that iconic 90s shooter Doom is playable on almost anything. Now it's playable on a tractor. There's a more serious background to this, though. As Wired reports, a hacker known as Sick Codes presented a new jailbreak for John Deere & Co. tractors at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas. Digital locks are imposed on vehicles by manufacturers, preventing farmers from modifying and repairing their own equipment. The right-to-repair has proven controversial in the farming industry, but Sick Codes has found a workaround. Read more  ( 15 min )

Paradox, the developer of strategy game Crusader Kings 3, is doubling the price of the game's DLC packs. Currently priced at $6.99 (£5.19 in the UK), the Flavour Packs will cost $12.99 from 13th September. In a forum post (thanks TheGamer), the developer said it was "altering the prices of our Flavour Packs (Northern Lords and Fate of Iberia) to reflect the overall value of this kind of content moving forward". Read more  ( 15 min )

Square Enix and Kojima Productions will be taking part in the Tokyo Game Show's upcoming VR event. Bandai Namco, Capcom and Konami, to name but a few, will also be exhibiting at the event, which takes place between 15th and 18th September. The site for the show itself is shrouded in mystery for now, with the organisers simply teasing the stage for this event is a "dungeon" and the following text: Read more  ( 15 min )

Yesterday, Valve updated its SteamVR software, for use on VR headsets, and had some unusual content in the update notes. In the full list, the usual gamut of notes that you'd expect like bug fixes and quality of life improvements are detailed. But above all that, there's a literal bug fix. For all you insect lovers. Read more  ( 15 min )

As teased last week, the Dragon Ball and Fortnite crossover is now live. Four iconic characters are available in the game - Son Goku, Vegeta, Bulma, and Beerus - as well as a number of new quests and modes. Players will now find a new Power Unleashed tab containing special limited-time quests and rewards that will track your rising Power Level. There are seven sets of quests and with each completed, players will earn a Dragon Ball - collect all seven to earn the Shenron Glider. Read more  ( 15 min )

Wave Race 64 is the next N64 game to be added to Nintendo Switch Online. The game will be available for Expansion Pack members from 19th August. Released in 1996, the jet ski racer was a launch window release for the console and was praised for its realistic water physics. And yes, you can ride a dolphin. Read more  ( 14 min )

My introduction to Rocket League was suitably chaotic. A friend had secured beta access, setting up 4v4 matches with six other people across two TVs. We played for hours. Between the unlikely goals, great assists, and questionable demolition tactics, I loved every moment. There isn’t a game that encapsulates the “just one more round” mentality better than Rocket League. It's currently my most played game of all time, each explosive match calling out for another, and I wasn't alone in being hooked. Psyonix knew it had a hit, partnering with Sony to make it a “free” PS Plus game at launch, sealing the deal for many. Seven years later, Rocket League remains a winner. Rocket League splits players into teams and asks them to score goals - using rocket powered cars rather than feet, and employing a ball that absolutely towers over them on the pitch. Competing to score the most points before time runs out – if you’re drawing after 5 mins, say hello to overtime and sudden death – you’ve got a few tricks at your disposal. Boost pads are evenly spread across the field to provide a speed advantage, for instance, letting us shoot at pace or demolish an opponent’s vehicle if we collide at max speed. If you fancy trying something more technical, jump up and use that boost for an aerial shot. As you might have gathered, Rocket League is primarily multiplayer focused, placing heavy emphasis on team strategy and player rotation. You won’t find set positions like in a football match, though setting up assists from the midfield or staying behind as goalkeeper often feels natural. Co-ordinating with teammates is key and victory always feels better together. Read more  ( 19 min )

Disney has announced it's hosting a game-focused digital showcase this September, with a "sneak peek" at Amy Hennig's new Marvel game promising to be a highlight. The Disney & Marvel Games Showcase, which is running as part of this year's D23 Expo, will be streamed on Friday, 9th September, at 9pm in the UK/1pm PT. It's promising "all-new announcements" alongside additional details on previously revealed games. There'll be more from Disney Dreamlight Valley, for instance, alongside additional news on Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and the recently delayed Marvel's Midnight Suns. The real draw, though, unless you really love your village life sims, is a glimpse of Skydance New Media and Hennig's "Marvel ensemble" game. Read more  ( 15 min )

Valve has just released Proton 7.0-4 as their newest downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying many Windows games on Linux with great success for the Linux desktop, the Steam Deck, and more...  ( 4 min )

For those weighing whether to pursue the full eight memory channel configuration for the new Ryzen Threadripper 5000 series or starting out with just four or six memory modules, here are some reference benchmarks across four, six, and eight memory channels with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5965WX 24-core processor while running Ubuntu Linux.  ( 4 min )

The latest partnership between Microsoft and Canonical is an announcement today of native .NET availability for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS hosts as well as containers...  ( 4 min )

Up to this point loading updated CPU microcode on AMD processors under Linux has checked just to ensure every physical CPU core was loaded with the new microcode but not sibling threads for SMT processors. While logically that makes sense, it turns out some AMD microcode updates do carry out per-thread modifications that means the microcode updating needs to be carried out on every thread. A Linux fix is on its way to the kernel to adjust that behavior...  ( 5 min )

As part of today's "drm-misc-fixes" pull request, NVIDIA Ampere GA103 GPU support is set to be added to the Nouveau DRM driver with Linux 6.0...  ( 5 min )

Following Sunday's release of Linux 6.0-rc1, yesterday saw the release of 6.0-rc1-rt1 as the set of patches for providing real-time kernel support atop the upstream code-base. There is just roughly 50 patches to go until the PREEMPT_RT functionality is mainlined!..  ( 5 min )

Ahead of the upcoming openSUSE/SUSE Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP), whether to raise the x86_64 micro-architecture feature level required by the Linux OS continues to be evaluated and what options there are for making use of newer x86_64 instruction set extensions without necessarily forcing tightened CPU requirements / eliminating old hardware support...  ( 5 min )

When it comes to Linux on Arm laptops the recent excitement has been around the Asahi Linux porting work for the Apple M2 MacBooks and Linux 6.0 supporting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 and the flagship Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Arm laptop. Launched a few years ago though was the Lenovo Yoga C630 powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 and thanks now to the work of Linaro that older Arm laptop is seeing Linux support improvements...  ( 5 min )

LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm...  ( 4 min )

Efter tre års exklusivitet på pc.  ( 6 min )

Livsfarligt och urgulligt på samma gång.  ( 6 min )

Så länge man äger dess "Expansion Pack".  ( 6 min )

Kändisslagsmål i kvällens stream.  ( 6 min )

Efterlängtad online-funktion presenterad.  ( 6 min )

Efterlängtad online-funktion presenterad.  ( 6 min )

MMORPG-klassikern fyller 10 år.  ( 7 min )

Lågt förtroende för Bethesda och spelmotorn.  ( 7 min )

Spelnyheter från Marvel och Disney visas om drygt tre veckor.  ( 6 min )

Uppföljaren till Deliver Us the Moon får vänta.  ( 6 min )

Har de lyckats rädda hafsverket?  ( 6 min )

Om man inte har tid med en genomspelning innan november.  ( 6 min )

I samarbete med Private Division.  ( 6 min )

Spindelmannen svingar sig över från Playstation till PC i ett av de senaste årens mest hyllade actionspel. Calle sparkar igång redaktionens testrigg för ett snabbt prestandatest.  ( 11 min )

AMD tar bladet från munnen och bekräftar det officiella datumet för avtäckandet av processorerna i Ryzen 7000-serien, där dessa ska presenteras under ett livesänt evenemang.  ( 5 min )

Efter månader av utvecklarversioner och betatest har Google nu släppt Android 13 skarpt till Pixel-telefoner.  ( 5 min )

Mitten av september blir slutet av september när det röda laget påstås vilja krascha Intels avtäckande av Core 13000-seriens processorer.  ( 6 min )

Mitten av september blir slutet av september när det röda laget sägs vilja krascha Intels avtäckande av Core 13000-seriens processorer.  ( 6 min )

Kabellådan™ är den ökända lådan där alla äldre kablar från elektronisk utrustning av olika slag hamnar då kablarna kanske kan komma till användning i framtiden. Men oftast inte. Hur ser hoarderläget ut hos dig?  ( 5 min )

Ljusstark panel, hög upplösning, vertikalt läge och en kraftig krökning är några av egenskaperna som Samsung lyfter fram hos det påkostade flaggskeppet.  ( 6 min )

No content preview  ( 2 min )

Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate the DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations. You can join the party or organise something yourselves too! Today is also an opportunity for you to start or resume your contributions to Debian. For example, you can have a look at our list of Debian Teams, install the how-can-i-help package and see if there is a bug in any of the software that you use that you can help to fix, start designing your artwork candidate for the next release, contribute small tips on how to install Debian on your machines to our wiki pages https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/, or put a Debian live image in an USB memory and give it to some person near you, who still didn't discover Debian. Our favorite operating system is the result of all the work we do together. Thanks to everybody who has contributed in these 29 years, and happy birthday Debian!  ( 2 min )

I have experimented with a number of markdown editors and there are plenty of good ones there. However, I took an instant liking to Marktext. Here's why!  ( 25 min )

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic  ( 5 min )

Tech watchdog group worries iGiant will 'Sherlock' device manager Apple is preparing to compete unfairly against enterprise device management firm Jamf, an advocacy group claimed on Monday, and has asked regulators to take a stand.…  ( 6 min )

Cryptographically signs pics – but you'll pay $2,500 before you've bought a lens Sony has announced a new camera feature that the electronics goliath claims will make digital images immune to secret manipulation and forgery.…  ( 5 min )

Lawyers, journalists sue super-snoop agency and Spanish security biz The CIA illegally spied on US citizens while they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a lawsuit filed today has claimed.…  ( 5 min )

Rolling back to the pad tomorrow, the SLS might finally take flight in August NASA's huge Space Launch System (SLS) will get its three launch attempts in the coming weeks after officials approved an extension to validation of the Flight Termination System from 20 to 25 days.…  ( 4 min )

The arrest comes days after US Treasury levies sanctions against the crypto mixing service Dutch authorities have arrested a software developer suspected of working with Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixing service that only two days earlier was sanctioned by the US government for allegedly laundering money for ransomware operators and other cybercriminals.…  ( 5 min )

Not mentioned: China. Obvious target: China – even if the country hasn't designed advanced chips The United States is formally banning the export of four technologies tied to semiconductor manufacturing, calling the protection of the items "vital to national security." …  ( 4 min )

South Dublin County Council ban on buildouts set to be overturned by government Trouble is brewing in Ireland as a ban on datacenter buildouts in the Dublin area has reportedly been challenged by one developer, while Amazon has now been granted permission for two new facilities near the city amid growing concern over the amount of energy bit barns consume.…  ( 4 min )

Have your BitLocker key handy when updating, but maybe not on a Post-it stuck to the screen, OK? Windows users are reporting BitLocker problems after installing last week's security update for Secure Boot.…  ( 4 min )

Plan to regain semiconductor production market share may be a case of too little, too late Analysis  The long-awaited US CHIPS Act has finally been signed into law by President Biden, unlocking $52 billion in funding to boost the American semiconductor industry as a part of the broader $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act. Now the industry has to make good on its promises in a market where inflation is rapidly stifling demand.…  ( 7 min )

Newly formed Tahoe Research Limited will seek to license them to third parties Intel has entered into an agreement with IPValue Management Group that sees nearly 5,000 patents transferred to a newly formed company within the group that will seek to license them to third parties.…  ( 5 min )

Directs customers to Maintenance Reset Utility so they can continue to print Epson has clarified the dread "end of service life" inkjet printer warning with an updated support page directing users to its Maintenance Reset Utility after critics complained about repairability.…  ( 3 min )

Second quarter revenues at zero, though should jump to $12m following successful flights from Cornwall Virgin Orbit is burning less money, although it won't be launching quite as many rockets as originally hoped.…  ( 4 min )

Tim Peake set to return to ESA as the race to first vertical launch from British soil continues Feature  It promises to be a busy few years for British spaceflight. Astronaut Tim Peake is due to return to the European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK's first vertical launches are set to take place in Scotland.…  ( 5 min )

Of all the non-carbon energy options we have, this is the only one which can keep the lights on Opinion  What's GIF got to do with nuclear reactors? Commercial development of atomic power plants had largely stopped by the 1980s; even so you could do better than Deluxe Paint for your blueprints. Yet the connection is much more modern, to do with projects like the revival of molten salt tech as a new hope for zero-emission power.…  ( 6 min )

Brute force and ignorance does not win the day Who, Me?  We've all heard the one about the cleaner in the hospital pulling the wrong plug. But managing to push back the schedule by months through sheer brute force? Welcome to Who, Me?…  ( 4 min )

Beijing lifts the lid on how Alibaba, Douyin, Tencent, Baidu do business – and censor content Beijing's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has released information about the algorithms that some of the nation's biggest tech companies use to make their services work.…  ( 4 min )

Government said they need the Samsung boss back at work to deal with South Korea’s looming economic crisis South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol issued a widely anticipated pardon for Samsung heir and vice chairman Lee Jae-yong that came into effect today.…  ( 4 min )

Local startup can make it happen over 150km India's military has celebrated the nation's Independence Day by announcing it will adopt locally developed quantum key distribution (QKD)technology that can operate across distances of 150km.…  ( 4 min )

Presiding officer was not impressed by Cupertino's arguments or behavior Apple has been ordered to repair a MacBook Pro that displays all the symptoms of FlexGate – the syndrome of screen defects that the company has previously repaired for free – but which the company does not believe has the problem.…  ( 6 min )

COVID, flood surfing, crowds – what to pick? Black Hat  As last week's hacker summer camps would down it's clear that attendee numbers are still well down on the pre-COVID days, although things are recovering.…  ( 4 min )

Don't read the diffstat too closely, says Linus Torvalds – it's mostly another massive AMD update Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.…  ( 4 min )

PLUS Vietnam's massive infosec push; Philippines telco fight; Australia dumps COVID app; and more Asia in Brief  Elon Musk has written an article for the Cyberspace Administration of China's flagship magazine.…  ( 6 min )

The RTX 3090 Ti is the fastest consumer graphics card Nvidia has ever made - but the rumoured imminent arrival of their RTX 4090 graphics card means that it's now going for nearly £700 below its original £1879 UK RRP. In fact, you can now pick up one of these graphics cards for less than £1200, just £100 more than the launch price of the RTX 2080 Ti for around 75% more performance. Read more  ( 16 min )

The Razer Huntsman Mini Analog is one of a vanishingly small number of keyboards with analogue switches, meaning each key knows exactly how far down it's being pressed. That unlocks the door to some unique capabilities, from adjusting the sensitivity of the keyboard on the fly to using the WASD keys as a thumbstick replacement in racing games. It's also just a damn fine mechanical keyboard, with a comfortable 60% size, bright RGB lighting and premium PBT keycaps. You normally pay a lot for this kind of quality and functionality - £150, in fact - but today the keyboard has dropped to its lowest ever price of £97.94 over at Amazon UK. Read more  ( 17 min )

Keylocker is all about the rhythm. If you’re escaping a dystopian prison system where you can pay to upgrade to invisible handcuffs, your escape may as well have a jamming soundtrack. But you'll have to bring your own, because the world in Keylocker hates that stuff. Like in Footloose, music is an illegal activity. Read more  ( 17 min )

Sci-fi puzzle adventure Deliver Us Mars has seen its launch window moved from September to next February. Devs KeokeN Interactive put out a statement crediting the delay to ensuring the game is “the best it can be”. The game was first revealed back in March, and then announced for a 2022 release in June. Read more  ( 16 min )

Vikings aren’t really known for their acrobatic prowess but Owlboy developers D-Pad Studio are limbering up for their next indie game, Vikings On Trampolines. It’s based on an award-winning experimental game the team produced back in 2011. Witness the sheer Nordic bounciness in the trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

The greatest legacy left by humanity for alien archaeologists to find in the aeons to come will be millions of random devices running id Software’s pioneering FPS Doom. The latest such piece of kit is the display from a John Deere tractor, jailbroken and fragging away at demons at this past weekend’s DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas. The tractor computer was hacked by Sick Codes, who’s trying to draw attention to farming equipment manufacturers who lock down their products to prevent owners from repairing them. Read more  ( 16 min )

Mindhack, an upcoming visual novel adventure, opens in a jail cell, as a criminal named Unid is brought before you by a pair of armed security guards. Your reputation precedes you: before the accused can even sit down, they call out your unusual ability to hack into the minds of people to ‘patch’ their flaws, turning their nefarious intentions into fields of flowers. But it’s ok, isn’t it? After all, the person in front of you has committed a crime and must be rehabilitated; reckless driving, hit and run, and arson. So, you get to work. Talking to Unid allows you to build a rapport and understand their motivations. You learn about their past. They talk of their difficult childhood, pets, a lack of support - broken systems that left them behind and put them on their current path. It doesn’t matter. You have a job to do. And now, with that bit of knowledge, you’ve found the 'bug' in their programming. After initiating a hack on their brain, you eradicate this flaw, forcefully transforming their mind into a paradise of purity. Unid will never commit another crime again. Have you done the right thing? Read more  ( 17 min )

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This weekend, my eye was caught by swashbuckling chandelier murder, a bumpy train ride, and lots of good colours. Come see! Read more  ( 17 min )

Free-to-play open world ARPG Genshin Impact updates to version 3.0 on August 24th, developers HoYoverse have revealed. The update is rather fancily called The Morn A Thousand Roses Brings, and introduces the new ley-line-filled Sumeru region. You can scout ahead by watching the extremely dramatic trailer below. Read more  ( 16 min )

Instead of commanding a group of rugged, blood-soaked mercenaries on a turn-based death crawl through unimaginable horrors, how about a neo-Victorian circus troupe brawling with biomechatronic Londoners? That's Circus Electrique, a turn-based RPG that's much more lighthearted than its Darkest Dungeon counterpart (and seemingly main inspiration). But after playing a preview of the game’s first mission, there's more than meets the eye in this part steampunk RPG, part circus tycoon management sim. You play as Amelia, a young, bold journalist returning to London to cover the grand re-opening of the Circus Electrique. A metaphorical spanner gets lobbed into the works, however, as the ceremony is interrupted with news that London’s citizens have started attacking each other (more than your average fisticuffs to get on the tube). Oddly, this doesn’t seem to have affected Amelia and your motley circus troupe, who venture out into London’s dangerous streets to find answers. Read more  ( 19 min )

Franchise mash-up brawler MultiVersus slams into season one today, despite only recently being postponed indefinitely. Although nothing has been announced yet, it appears that DC Comics supervillain Black Adam and Gremlins antagonist Stripe are new characters being teased for the game’s roster of fighters. Players are sharing screenshots and footage of ads for MultiVersus that show off the gruesome twosome. Read more  ( 16 min )

No message, profile, or other data exposed—but SMS remains a weakness.  ( 5 min )

"We can use this system to do quantum simulations of electrons and superconductivity."  ( 6 min )

Apple's ads business has been a stop-and-go affair, but it's ready to go again.  ( 5 min )

Advertisers have to verify abortion services, but not businesses, on Google Maps.  ( 6 min )

DirectX9 is still in relatively wide use, given that it's 20 years old.  ( 5 min )

The rocket may launch just two weeks from now.  ( 5 min )

Move would help it meet its carbon emissions plans.  ( 6 min )

Lola built some of the best racing cars in the world but went bust in 2012.  ( 6 min )

Not a massive overhaul, but it adds Material You features, Bluetooth LE Audio, & more.  ( 5 min )

Feature you'd normally want for secure software opened a huge hole.  ( 5 min )

Three-game collection for $599 will have some unfortunate edits.  ( 6 min )

"He isn't pale; he is gray. He doesn't look tired; he looks ancient."  ( 6 min )

In the finale of our experiment, we look at how the low/no-code tools performed.  ( 6 min )

Exploit now provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.  ( 6 min )

Eukaryotes, archaea, and bacteria share a set of proteins that block many viruses.  ( 7 min )

After Qualcomm announced their Cloud AI 100 Accelerator back in 2019, in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic they posted a Linux driver for this accelerator. That driver didn't get picked up for the mainline Linux kernel and two years later there still is little fanfare around the Qualcomm AI Cloud Accelerator hardware. However, now they have posted a new Linux driver that goes the DRM driver route...  ( 5 min )

Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android...  ( 4 min )

The beta of GNOME 43 is now available for testing ahead of the stable release next month...  ( 5 min )

Yesterday marked the release of Linux 6.0-rc1 and as such the merge window is no over and no more feature work is set to land in this kernel version. Here is my write-up of all the interesting new features and changes/improvements coming for Linux 6.0.  ( 6 min )

Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux kernel's stable maintainer and effectively Linus Torvalds' second-in-command has suggested avoiding Intel Alder Lake laptops. While much of the Alder Lake laptop support for Linux is in good shape, the exception is around web cameras. These newer laptops with Intel's latest web-camera tech are not currently supported by the mainline kernel and require proprietary software for use. Some platforms like Ubuntu and ChromeOS are picking up these blobs for now while a proper open-source, upstream solution is likely months -- or likely about one year -- away...  ( 6 min )

AMD today sent out revised patches for improving the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling Linux driver that aims to provide better power efficiency than the generic ACPI CPUFreq driver that has long been relied upon for AMD processors...  ( 5 min )

Less than one month away is the release of Blender 3.3 and it looks like Intel's initial oneAPI GPU acceleration is ready and in decent shape for Windows and Linux...  ( 5 min )

While Linux 6.0 will bring a lot of shiny new features, Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) is one of the anticipated changes that isn't going to land now until Linux 6.1. But in the interim, MGLRU v14 was posted today that re-bases the code against 6.0-rc1 to help facilitate more testing of this kernel change that primarily helps Linux systems under memory pressure...  ( 5 min )

After the two week long merge window, Linus Torvalds this afternoon released the first release candidate of Linux 6.0. Over the next roughly two months the Linux 6.0 kernel will stabilize but already from my early testing on various systems it is in nice shape and the features and performance are looking great...  ( 6 min )

If you're building a new PC, you may be able to use an old Windows key for its OS.  ( 62 min )

A Linux expert has reported that Alder Lake laptops sporting the MIPI IPU6 are suffering from Linux compatibility issues surrounding proprietary drivers. Full open source drivers are a long way away.  ( 59 min )

Appeals to potential customers to “save your neck and your desk space,” by opting for this decidedly different dual-24-inch clamshell display on a stand.  ( 60 min )

The developer decided to go public with this Switch-fan OS work now that the milestone of the first playable commercial game title has been reached.  ( 60 min )

Nvidia has reportedly restarted production on its RTX 3080 12GB SKU, as a result of oversupply issues surrounding its GA102 die.  ( 59 min )

A tiny embedded system that supports a range of Intel processors.  ( 62 min )

The Asus ROG Chakram X is a stunning example of a gaming mouse, but has some major issues that should deter just about anyone.  ( 64 min )

GNOME 43 Beta is now available for public testing ahead of the September 21st, 2022, release of the GNOME 43 desktop environment series. Here's what's new since last month's GNOME 43 Alpha release. The post GNOME Celebrates 25th Anniversary with Beta Release of Upcoming GNOME 43 Desktop appeared first on 9to5Linux - do not reproduce this article without permission. This RSS feed is intended for readers, not scrapers.  ( 38 min )

Gothams svar på Rödluvan visar var skåpet ska stå.  ( 6 min )

Och det är Handygames som tar hand om denna version.  ( 6 min )

Antalet samtidiga spelare var något högre för God of War.  ( 6 min )

I tisdagens FZ Play-stream.  ( 6 min )

Spelet som får WoW: Classic att kännas nytt.  ( 6 min )

”80 000 nya spelare om dagen”.  ( 6 min )

Skräck, gotik och mycket annat.  ( 9 min )

Domstolsdokument bekräftar.  ( 7 min )

Ta en tur till lägret och ner i gruvorna.  ( 6 min )

Skapat av gamnla Burnout-utvecklare.  ( 6 min )

Med starka C&C-vibbar.  ( 6 min )

Valve has confirmed that they are (again) increasing the amount of people that will be invited to purchase a Steam Deck.  ( 4 min )

THQ Nordic, 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks recently revealed Tempest Rising an upcoming classic RTS and after watching the trailer I absolutely need this.  ( 4 min )

Probably one of the best spaceship building sandbox games around, Avorion has just grown tremendously with the Into The Rift DLC out now.  ( 4 min )

Following from the successful Kickstarter campaign in 2020, Caligari Games have announced their Burton-style point and click adventure will release on September 15.  ( 4 min )

Kitsune Zero is being releases on September 12 as a paid DLC for the free platformer Super Bernie World. This will act as a prequel to the upcoming standalone game Kitsune Tails.  ( 4 min )

Bottles is easily the most simple way to manage installing and running Windows games and apps on Linux outside of Steam. A new release is out now with plenty of useful tweaks.  ( 4 min )

Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS which brings together an updated download with all the bug fixes, updated apps, driver upgrades and more.  ( 4 min )

Heroic Games Launcher enables you to download games on Linux and Steam Deck from both the Epic Store and GOG. A big new release is out now with some massive new features.  ( 4 min )

News has been doing the rounds for a little bit about Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) suddenly not working after system updates for some users, turns out it's an issue with glibc.  ( 4 min )

Xiaomi Mijia Temperature Sensor I've been having some temperature problems in my house, so I wanted to set up some thermometers which I could read from a computer, and look at trends. I bought a pack of three cheap Xiaomi IoT thermometers. There's some official Xiaomi tooling to access them from smartphones and suchlike, but I wanted something more open. The thermometers have some rudimentary security on them to try and ensure you use the official tooling. This is pretty weak, and the open-source Home Assistant (HA) has support for querying them. I wasn't already running HA and it looked to do more than I needed right now. gathering A friend told me that it was trivial to write custom firmware to the devices. It's so easy you can do it from a web-based flasher: in fact, anyone in range can…  ( 2 min )

Most of us carry cell phones with us almost everywhere we go. So much so that we often forget not just the usefulness, but even the joy, of having our own radios. For instance: When traveling to national parks or other wilderness areas, family and friends can keep in touch even where there is no cell coverage. It is a lot faster to just push a button and start talking than it is to unlock a phone, open the phone app, select a person, wait for the call to connect, wait for the other person to answer, etc. “I’m heading back.” “OK.” Boom, 5 seconds, done. A phone user wouldn’t have even dialed in that time. A whole group of people can be on the same channel. You can often buy a radio for less than the monthly cost of a cell plan. From my own experience, as a person and a family that enj…

In 2016 Microsoft stopped reporting sales figures of the Xbox One, but recent documents from the company have confirmed how little the console sold compared to the PS4. If you remember the early days of the Xbox One, they were a bit of a disaster due to some poor early decisions (that were admittedly quite quickly backtracked), and three years after its release in 2016 Microsoft stopped reporting sales figures. But now as reported by The Verge, in some documents filed to Brazil's national competition regulator, Microsoft has admitted Xbox One sales figures were less than half of the PS4. "Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation," said Microsoft, as translated from Portuguese by The Verge. Read more  ( 15 min )

Tower of Fantasy has been popping off in a major way since its launch last week, with the character creation standing out as a major plus for the waves of oncoming gamers exploring the world. Some of the more creatively-minded out there have even uploaded their customised looks to the in-game character lobby, which lets you dress up as well-known characters like Sasuke from Naruto, Jellal from Fairy Tail, and… Adolf Hiter. As it stands right now, Hitler (we could be nice and say Charlie Chaplin) is among some of the most popular preset characters in the game. They’re currently ranked 13th among male characters and 41st overall at 5,209 favourites. This puts them above 2B from Nier Automata, Naruto, and Tanjiro from Demon Slayer. What this means is that right now you at home — yes, you — can take on the world as arguably the world’s most evil man. I actually saw Hitler out in the wild in Tower of Fantasy. I sat and watched as he struggled to throw a water core at a Chowchow plant for around 3 minutes before storming off and fending off some hyenas. Let me tell you, you’ve not played Tower of Fantasy until you’ve seen the leader of the Third Reich do aerial combos in frozen time. Read more  ( 16 min )

Lord of the Rings fans should be happy, as Wētā Workshop is officially working on a new game set in the Middle-earth universe. Private Division announced the news today (August 15) and will be on publishing duties for the as-of-yet unnamed title. Last year, a job ad for a producer role at Wētā Workshop was advertised, which was supposed to be for a new project based on a "major worldwide IP." It seems like that IP is in fact Lord of the Rings, which makes a lot of sense considering the studio literally worked on the effects of the original films. The press release noted that the game is still in "early development," and doesn't currently have a release date, but is apparently expected to launch during Take Two's Fiscal year 2024. Read more  ( 16 min )

One curious player has dived into the PC files for Spider-Man Remastered, and sure enough, they found something interesting. The interesting bit being that Spider-Man very well could've featured co-op and PvP elements in an alternate universe. Twitter user, DniweTamp, shared screenshots of what they'd found in the game files, and they reveal that co-op and PvP were once in development for the superhero title. The screenshots have also since been checked and verified by VGC. The information comes directly from the games executable files and shows that multiplayer mode would've included callouts to 'the Superior Spider Man' alongside a winner message. It also appears the two characters would've stepped into the shoes of either Miles Morales or Peter Parker for the rumble. Read more  ( 16 min )

If it's been a while since you've played 2018's God of War, you're in luck, as PlayStation has created a very convenient recap video. With the amount of games there are to get through practically on a daily basis, it would be pretty understandable if the story of the practically ancient (four years counts as ancient) God of War didn't manage to stick around in your head for too long. Thankfully, over on the PlayStation blog we've been gifted with a recap, paired with a Myths of Midgard video narrated by actress Felicia Day. The blog post is pretty much your standard recap affair. It reminds you who Krato is, if you managed to forget, and his son, Atreus, also known as capital B Boy. To go along with the important plot beats, you've got some screenshots that help visualise everything, but the better way to refamiliarise yourself with the story is the video. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new MultiVersus leak appears to have revealed that someone fed a Mogwai after midnight (also Black Adam is there). After a short delay, MultiVersus Season One launches later today, and soon enough the game will see the arrival of Morty of Rick and Morty fame. But it also seems that some more characters that haven't had an official reveal yet were accidentally shown off early, as reported by Eurogamer. Game director Tony Huynh shared yesterday (August 14) that players could expect to see some unannounced characters in the login screen today (August 15), presumably once Season One launched, but an ad on the Xbox store has gone live a little bit early. Read more  ( 15 min )

The Pokémon Company International has announced its commitment to global organisations in support of children and minority groups. A subsidiary of The Pokémon Company, The Pokémon Company International is responsible for the Pokémon brand in all regions other than Asia. As the Pokémon series has hit 25 years since its first game was released (Pokémon Red and Blue in 1996), the company has pledged to donate at least $25 million over five years to organisations across the world dedicated to "improving the lives of children and supporting social equity". Read more  ( 15 min )

Here's an odd crossover: FIFA and Marvel. EA has announced a collaboration with Marvel that reimagines some of the most famous footballers of yesteryear as superheroes. Ex-footballers such as USA stalwart Landon Donovan, legendary Chelsea defender Ricardo Carvalho and all-conquering Man City midfielder Yaya Touré have unique illustrated designs that replace real-world player photos in FIFA 23's Ultimate Team mode. Read more  ( 15 min )

Welcome the latest edition of DF Direct Weekly - Digital Foundry's regular show on the latest gaming and technology news. Perhaps not surprisingly, the lion's share of our news discussion this week concerns the release of Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC. We've discussed the various trials we had in delivering our coverage - not least the arrival of a major (and welcome!) patch on embargo day. However, in this week's show, we talk about our discussions with Nixxes, remaining performance hurdles and the title's remarkable CPU burden, especially with ray tracing enabled. However, we also spend a fair amount of time talking about the rising cost of gaming - or more specifically, the huge increases in energy costs. In the UK at least, we're looking at a potentially gigantic and disastrous increase in the cost of electricity in October - and the recent news on next-gen GPUs raising their TDPs has got a lot of people concerned. First of all, I do think that the biggest TDP increases will be found on the more expensive GPUs, but ultimately, perhaps we should be looking at the energy savings brought about by frame-rate limiters. As we discuss in this week's show, you never really fully utilise a CPU - you buy a more expensive processor to mitigate against the worst case scenarios... so why not adopt the same strategy with a GPU too? I'm perfectly happy to play most triple-A fare at 90-100fps, effectively a 10-11ms render time per frame. Beyond that, my perception barely sees much difference - but the energy cost in running a GPU unlocked is significantly higher. So setting an arbitrary frame-rate cap that sits at the sweet spot of the game you're playing seems like a good idea to me, the idea being that your extra GPU performance is only deployed where needed in the service of a consistent experience. It'll be interesting to see if Nvidia, AMD or Intel consider some kind of energy efficiency mode - but of course, using DLSS or FSR 2.0 is also a big energy saver too. Read more  ( 17 min )

If there's anything that games have taught us over the past decade, it's that people want to play as animals. More specifically, we want to play as annoying little critters and get away with all sorts of things that real human life does not look kindly upon. Thankfully, indie developers have been paying attention to the success seen by previous games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game. Assignment understood. And I say that with confidence, and I'm about to show you why. Read more  ( 17 min )

PlayStation has unveiled a new trailer ahead of God of War Ragnarök's release. This trailer, titled Myths of Midgard, offers a brief summary of 2018's God of War epic. It stars Felicia Day, as she narrates the story of Kratos and Atreus so far. There are also little 'cameos' from know-it-all Mimir throughout the retelling, which is full of some really gorgeous artwork. You can check it out for yourself below. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new Lord of the Rings game will be published by Private Division in collaboration with Weta Workshop. Details on the game itself are unknown, though it will be set in the Middle-earth universe of J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. Private Division is part of Take-Two Interactive and has previously published the likes of Kerbal Space Program, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, and Obsidian's The Outer Worlds. It's also set to publish new games from Ori and the Blind Forest's Moon Studios, OlliOlli creators Roll7, and Armello developer League of Geeks. Read more  ( 15 min )

One extremely dedicated Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild player has gone the extra mile, and unearthed a little known exploit of the game's Yiga Clan. So, it turns out that those 'travellers' that litter Hyrule, but are in fact members of the Yiga Clan in disguise, are actually "evil twins" of other inhabitants found across the map. As documented by justlookingfordragon on Reddit, the 'disguises' used by the Yiga are "1:1 clones of other, properly named NPCs that exist somewhere" in the game's world. Read more  ( 16 min )

I learned about Affogato in a PR email I didn't read properly, and I thought it was about running a coffee shop. It is, sort of. You run a coffee shop, handle the grinds and the brewing and the little shakers of sugar. But you're also a witch. And you can dive inside the minds of your customers and solve problems by fighting cleverly framed battles. So you run a coffee shop and then some. The coffee shop stuff inevitably reminds me of Coffee Talk, and Affogato has captured the same evening setting, sparkling with all its urban promise. It's fun trying to make drinks properly, remembering the differences between them and mastering the intricacies of seasoning. But the game properly comes alive in the battles. Affogato calls this system a sort of reverse tower-defense, and it calls to mind another reverse tower-defense game that I haven't thought about in years: Anomaly: Warzone Earth. In Anomaly, you lead a convoy through a city laced with turrets and enemy rockets. Affogato zooms in a little: you play cards to place units upon a track that threads through a bunch of baddies. They attack you automatically and you attack them automatically. Early on - I've only played the demo - it's all about picking the route and defending yourself. Read more  ( 15 min )

Matt, one of the most famous faces from Nintendo Wii Sports era, is now available in Switch Sports for those that are looking to up their game. "Interested in a tougher challenge in #NintendoSwitchSports," asked Nintendo. "Try entering ZR + R + A or ZL + L + → on the difficulty select screen." This text in itself wasn't enough to set the internet ablaze. However, the picture accompanying the news was. Why? Because it showed Matt with his new 'legend' title brandishing a baton ready to take on players (thanks, IGN). Read more  ( 15 min )

Last week Twitch updated its policy for its TwichCon San Diego event, making masks a requirement while indoors as well as proof of vaccination or a negative covid test. Many potential attendees were put off by the lack of safety measures, but following the policy update others are now refusing to attend due to the mask requirement. FaZe Clan is organising its own event in San Diego at the same time, and its co-owner Nickmercs has stated masks won't be required. Read more  ( 15 min )

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered released three days ago on PC, and modders have been hard at work over the weekend. There are already several mods which reshade the game, like this one from BadRusMan that emulates a more cinematic style, or overhaul the visuals, like this noir mod by ManWithAPlan. There's also a mod which disables the HUD and enemy outlines, by Mixerced, if you want to remove the interface whilst you play. Read more  ( 15 min )

Ahead of its November release, a new image showing off concept art for Odin from God of War Ragnarök made its way online over the weekend. This leak came from industry insider AestheticGamer, also known as Dusk Golem. "I'm just holding onto a bunch of misc God of War Ragnarok things right now, decided to only post concept art of Odin. All I'm going to post, and yes, Odin looks a lot different than I imagined too," they wrote before sharing the image and wishing everyone a good day. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new mod for Cyberpunk 2077 allows players to change the design of Johnny Silverhand to match his appearance in the original TTRPG. Project 2020 from modder ErebusEquity, available on Nexus Mods, includes tabletop appearances, original looks, and multiple face swap and hair swap options, as spotted by TheGamer. Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG from 1988, but has Silverhand played by Keanu Reeves in a central role to the plot. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new leak for Warner Bros.' brawler MultiVersus has revealed that both Stripe from Gremlins and DC's Black Adam will be joining the battle roster. As revealed by _FireMonkey on Twitter, the twosome can be seen in the game's season one startup screen, which Warner Bros. set live a little too early. The company had originally said that upcoming fighters would be teased in MultiVersus' start up screen, but unfortunately the developer jumped the gun a bit on that one. The duo will join the likes of current characters such as Bugs Bunny, Batman and Arya Stark. Meanwhile, Morty of Rick and Morty fame will be joining the fray on 23rd August. Read more  ( 16 min )

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered is off to a great start on PC, but Cult of the Lamb isn't far behind. Insomniac's PlayStation exclusive released last week on PC and it already has the second highest concurrent peak on Steam for PlayStation Studios, behind God of War. Its all-time peak is 66,436 players, behind God of War's 73,529, making it the second biggest launch for the studio on PC. It's currently the number one top selling game on Steam. Read more  ( 15 min )

Med händerna fulla med problem väljer Intel att inte längre stödja det äldre DirectX 9. Istället ska funktionaliteten bibehållas med hjälp av emulering.  ( 6 min )

Efter att inte pratat om säljsiffror på flera år bekräftar Microsoft att Xbox One såldes i hälften så många exemplar som Playstation 4.  ( 6 min )

Till hösten väntas det koreanska bolaget släppa lös nästa generations SSD-enheter för konsumenter, där paradnumret är högre överföringshastigheter tack vare PCI Express 5.0.  ( 5 min )

LG Display vill göra OLED-paneler tillgängliga i ännu fler storlekar och planerar att visa upp en OLED på 20 tum innan årets slut.  ( 6 min )

SweClockers har talat! Sommarens tjusigaste bygge har röstats fram och det blev Vertikal av UnknownBum som kammade hem segern.  ( 5 min )

The apt-key is being deprecated and your system knows that. But do you know what you should be doing for getting packages from external repositories?  ( 27 min )

stuff comic See also: Squires.nz | Instagram | Twitter The post Stuff appeared first on Moonbeard.  ( 1 min )

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic  ( 5 min )

No content preview  ( 1 min )

Intel Arc "Alchemist", kvartalsrapporter och färska produkter trängs i nyhetsflödet. Hur mycket har du snappat upp under den här varma augustiveckan?  ( 5 min )

Det återstår en månad innan Ryzen 7000 enligt uppgift finns på hyllorna, men en kanadensisk återförsäljare listar redan nu en framtida processorkvartett.  ( 5 min )

I veckans video visas hur en dator kan byggas in i toalettstolen – perfekt för skräckspel eller extra långa sittningar.  ( 5 min )

Intel has made the decision to remove native DirectX 9 support from its latest Xe iGPs and Arc GPUs, and replace DX9 with DX12 emulation instead.  ( 60 min )

MSI’s MPG X670E Carbon Wi-Fi is about €620, and the MSI Pro X670-P Wi-Fi about €410 on average. Converting to USD and taking off VAT would give pricing of $495 and $320, respectively.  ( 62 min )

Preliminary Ryzen 7000 prices are here and are roughly 10 to 12% higher than Ryzen 5000 was at MSRP.  ( 59 min )

Maker and developer Pheux9558 is using a Raspberry Pi to power a custom CNC drawing machine with the help of an Arduino and recycled PC components.  ( 62 min )

The Raspberry Pi Pico W is mostly found powering maker projects, but in this how-to we use it to build an extremely low power web server.  ( 64 min )

New court documents have confirmed that Sony's PS4 console sold "twice as many" units as Microsoft's Xbox One during last-gen's "console wars". Confirmation comes via Brazilian court papers wherein Microsoft is defending its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in front of the Brazilian competition authority, CADE. As spotted by GameLuster and translated via Google Translate - so bear with me; this may not be a 100 per cent word-for-word translation - page 17/18 (paragraph 46) of Microsoft's own published court papers state that "Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed [sic] base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox [One units] in the last generation". Read more  ( 16 min )

Playtonic and developer MegaWobble have reached out to fans of its upcoming Lil Gator Game to warn them that any emails purporting to be offering beta testing are a "scam". "It has come to our attention that someone is offering beta testing for Lil Gator Game," publisher Playtonic tweeted over the weekend. "We can confirm this is a SCAM and not from Playtonic or Lil Gator Game. "If we were offering this to our communities we would announce it on our Twitter and not via any other channels," the tweet added. Read more  ( 15 min )

Three fans have taken Better Call Saul and Gameboy'd it. A three-minute teaser - which includes light spoilers for S1E9, S5E8, and S6E5, so be warned - lovingly recreates Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould's Breaking Bad spin-off as a monochrome Gameboy game, complete with plenty of fan service touches, including one of the scariest things I've ever seen: a happy Mike. The demake includes character options - which ranks your three playable characters Jimmy, Kim, and Mike by their Guts, Hustle, Authority, and Lawyer traits as well as unique passive skills - cut-scenes, and even a fab chip-tune version of the theme track. The slightly spoilerific gameplay we see plays on some of the scenarios Jimmy's found himself in over the years and I really, really want to play it. Read more  ( 15 min )

It's high time Digital Foundry took a look at Apple Silicon and today we're going to be looking at the higher-end chips in the line-up. Our focus is on the monster that is the M1 Ultra, found within the latest Apple Mac Studio, but we're also going to be checking out the MacBook Pro's M1 Max. It's the M1 Ultra that truly commands our attention though: this system-on-chip represents the highest end computer processor Apple has designed to date, with the firm claiming it should be as fast as a high-end Windows desktop. Packing 20 CPU cores, a 21 teraflop GPU, and 800GB/s of memory bandwidth, it certainly seems like it could be - but how does it measure up in real-world testing and how well does it game? The M1 and M2 lines are the culmination of a long journey that has seen the firm transition away from SoCs based on third party design and IP, moving all chip design in-house to the furthest extent realistically possible. Apple designs its own GPUs, its own CPUs, and handles SoC design and integration. This results in tremendous control over processor design - the kind of control you would need to scale a phone processor up for high-end desktops. Which brings us to the M1 Ultra. Since 2020, Apple has been moving its Mac desktops and notebooks away from Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs and over to its in-house SOCs, taking the same fundamental tech from iPhones and integrating it into computers. Apple started with lower-end and lower-power form factors, but finally came around to high-end desktops with the release of the Ultra a few months ago. The M1 Ultra isn't really its own unique chip, however. It's actually two M1 Max SoCs connected over a high-bandwidth 2.5TB/s interposer. To the operating system and the user it seems like one monolithic chip with 1 CPU and GPU, but in reality this is two chips linked through a first-of-its-kind interconnect with the performance to support a dual-chip GPU and CPU. Read more  ( 24 min )

It looks like another Avatar game - this one called Avatar The Last Airbender: Quest for Balance - is on the way. This is a different Avatar game from Ubisoft's recently delayed Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and also different from Avatar: Generations, which was announced earlier this week and is, confusingly, also seemingly based on the popular Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. As spotted by VGC, the unannounced PS4 game has popped up on Amazon Japan with a mid-November release date, but interestingly, it's listed as an import from North America, suggesting it's a Western release. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new livestream has revealed more about Genshin Impact's upcoming 3.0 update, The Morn a Thousand Rose Brings. Along with a lengthy new teaser video - which you can see below - we learned that 3.0, entitled The Morn a Thousand Rose Brings, is all set to release on 24th August, 2022. As Jessica recently summarised for us, 3.0 brings the Sumeru region to the game, the Dendro element, continues the main storyline, and will introduce lots of new characters. We now know these include four-star Electro Dori, along with upcoming additions five-star Dendro Tighnari and Collei, the latter of which - who is a four-star Dendro specialist - can be added for free via the Graven Innocence event. Zhongli is making a return, along with Ganyu and Kokomi, all of whom are five-star. Read more  ( 16 min )

Director Chad Stahelski has confirmed that his movie adaptation of Ghost of Tsushima will be "a complete Japanese cast, in Japanese". Speaking to Collider, Stahelski said that while it may "scare the shit out of most people", Sony is "on board with backing [him] on that" and "Western audiences in general are getting more and more used to [reading subtitles]". "Honestly, it's probably the same things that would scare the shit out of most people. It's a fantasy period piece," he said. "It's done with reverence to Akira Kurosawa, who's probably in the top five biggest influences of my life as far as film goes. It's a chance to push technology and people in a story that's timeless. It's your typical mythological story of good versus evil, finding a man, watching him change the world or the world changes him. It's all the Joseph Campbell stuff that you'd love in a story. You put that in with, obviously, so I'm told I have a bit of a Samurai fetish, which is probably true from Manga and anime and stuff. Read more  ( 16 min )

Despite widespread issues regarding part shortages, Nintendo has recently confirmed that it has plans to increase the price of the Nintendo Switch. Earlier this month, Nintendo did report that Switch sales had fallen by 23% due to the semiconductor components shortage, but company president Shuntaro Furukawa has confirmed to Nikkei that the company wants to "avoid pricing people out," (thanks NME). "We're not considering [a price increase] at this point, for two reasons," said Furukawa. "Nintendo has sold more than 100 million Switch units so far, and it's important to maintain the momentum of our overall business. Generally speaking, a weak yen makes domestic Switch sales less profitable." Read more  ( 15 min )

Gotham Knights has steadily been showing us different members of the Bat family, with the latest trailer giving us a look at the rowdy Red Hood. Batman's whole deal, typically anyway, is that he doesn't kill anybody. That obviously has something to do with his own parents being killed, which he didn't exactly respond to in the most healthy way, but you still, it's a pretty hard rule. That rule doesn't apply so much to Red Hood, aka Jason Todd, a former Robin, as you can see in the most recent trailer and the frequency with which he shoots people. OK so technically if you look at his character page on the official website, he has supposedly "embraced Batman's non-lethal combat methods," but his character trailer sure does show him using a whole lot of violent combat methods, and he still does dual wield a couple of pistols. Read more  ( 15 min )

Eight years after the Silent Hills demo first released, the person responsible for taking PT down from the PSN store discusses what happened. We all dearly wish we could have seen Hideo Kojima's take on Silent Hill (and obviously so does he), but unfortunately we likely never will, outside of any footage of PT that's currently online. PT was an incredibly promising demo, and now due to its cancellation isn't even downloadable for those that owned it at any point in time. And now the very person who had it taken down from the PSN has spoken about the situation. At the time of PT's release, Pearl L. was Konami's first-party lead, and took to Twitter to talk pretty openly about some behind the scenes events regarding PT, though has since made their account private. Read more  ( 15 min )

According to a recent report, Microsoft has claimed that Sony pays for "blocking rights" to prevent developers adding their games to Xbox Game Pass. As reported by The Verge, the fairly substantial accusation comes as part of some documents that have been filed with Brazil's national competition regulator, as well as being part of a review of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. "Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth," Microsoft itself claims in a filing to the Administrative Council for Economic Defence, or CADE (translations from The Verge). "Sony pays for 'blocking rights' to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services." Read more  ( 15 min )

Saints Row is out in less than two weeks, so Volition and Deep Silver have dropped a new gameplay overview trailer diving into what you can expect from the game. For a gameplay overview trailer, there isn't much in the way of actual in-game gameplay, but it did dive into the various factions you'll meet in the game. First up is Los Panteros, who's run by certified beefcake Sergio. They're all about smuggling, and "have no hesitations about getting up on your business," making them one to watch out for. Then there's the more tech oriented, club culture donned Idols, who don't have any particular leader, only a faceless group known as The Collective, but do have a penchant for masks that Daft Punk would potentially approve of. Read more  ( 16 min )

First announced last year, SpongeBob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake has received its first gameplay trailer as part of THQ Nordic's recent showcase. Described as a "spiritual sequel" to the remake Battle For Bikini Bottom: Rehydrated, The Cosmic Shake is once again a 3D platformer that looks to have a variety of themed worlds, as is typical of the genre. Stylistically it's looking incredibly good, with nice bright and vivid colours that really match the tone of the series. The showcase trailer showed off SpongeBob and a for some reason floating, tinier version of companion Patrick Star travelling around different worlds and different points in time. Both of them are appropriately themed with different costumes depending on the locale. And interestingly, the game seems to have borrowed a little bit from Breath of the Wild with a paraglider in the form of a pizza box. Read more  ( 15 min )

Avatar: The Last Airbender is getting an official open world RPG titled Avatar: Generations, planned exclusively for mobile. Developed by Square Enix London Mobile in collaboration with Navigator Games, Avatar: Generations will be a free-to-play title based on the Nickelodeon series. The game is planned to soft launch in Canada, Denmark, South Africa, and Sweden to start, with more territories to come over the coming months. The game is only planned to release on mobile at this point in time, for both Android and iOS, though it seems that the game will not be playable on all iOS devices to start. Read more  ( 15 min )

It sounds like PUBG has done pretty well for itself since going free-to-play, apparently bringing in roughly 80,000 news users a day. More and more live service games are going free-to-play, with PUBG having done so in January of this year, and Fall Guys having done the same in June. A big part of that is likely to bring in more players, especially because all of the big, successful live service titles like Apex Legends and Destiny 2 are free-to-play. And according to developer Krafton's preliminary earnings report for the first half of 2022, PUBG going free to play has certainly helped. The report states that since going free-to-play in January, PUBG "has seen a steady inflow of more than 80,000 new users per day." To give you an idea of how many new players that is, PUBG went free-to-play 214 days ago, meaning over 17 million players have signed-up to play the game. Read more  ( 15 min )

...och alla kommer prata japanska.  ( 7 min )

Blocka dina vänner på Steam.  ( 6 min )

Heta South Park-rykten hos THQ  ( 6 min )

It is with a mix of pride and joy, but also some genuine astonishment and amazement, that we can share that the counter of reverse dependencies at CRAN for our RcppArmadillo package for R just crossed 1000 packages [1]: Conrad actually posted this a few weeks ago, by my count we were then still a few packages shy. In any event, having crossed this marker this summer, either then or now, and after more than a dozen years of working on the package is a really nice moment. Google Scholar counts nearly 500 citations for our CSDA paper (also this vignette), and that ratio of nearly a citation for every two packages used is certainly impressive. We have had the pleasure of working with so many other researchers and scientists using RcppArmadillo. Its combination of performance (C++, after all, …  ( 3 min )

Web caching is hard. And also, maybe I’m not that good under pressure? In any event, I made the following mistakes while trying to debug a web site using our nginx cache that bit the dust under heavy load today: Action: I ran curl -I https://website.org/ and it hung. Wrong assumption: Something is wrong with nginx. Why else would it just hang? Reconsidered conclusion: The resource (the home page) is a MISS, so nginx has to retrieve it from the origin, but the origin is over-loaded and timing out, so my request is also timing out. Maybe something is wrong with the nginx caching configuration since the home page really should be a HIT… but that’s another problem. Action: I changed the configuration from our normal caching set of directives to our aggressive caching set of directives, reloade…  ( 2 min )

These past couple of months I have been working to bring debuginfod to Ubuntu. I thought it would be a good idea to make this post and explain a little bit about what the service is and how I'm planning to deploy it. A quick recap: what's debuginfod? Here's a good summary of what debuginfod is: debuginfod is a new-ish project whose purpose is to serve ELF/DWARF/source-code information over HTTP. It is developed under the elfutils umbrella. You can find more information about it here: https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html In a nutshell, by using a debuginfod service you will not need to install debuginfo (a.k.a. dbgsym) files anymore; the symbols will be served to GDB (or any other debuginfo consumer that supports debuginfod) over the network. Ultimately, this makes the de…  ( 2 min )

Review: Still Not Safe, by Robert L. Wears & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe Publisher: Oxford University Press Copyright: November 2019 ISBN: 0-19-027128-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 232 Still Not Safe is an examination of the recent politics and history of patient safety in medicine. Its conclusions are summarized by the opening paragraph of the preface: Robert Wears was Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida specializing in patient safety. Kathleen Sutcliffe is Professor of Medicine and Business at Johns Hopkins. This book is based on research funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for which both Wears and Sutcliffe were primary investigators. (Wears died in 2017, but the acknowledgments imply that at least ea…  ( 5 min )

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic  ( 5 min )

NIST-led engineers are working on building a real-time alert system AI could help save firefighters' lives by predicting fire flashovers before they occur, according to new research published this week. …  ( 5 min )

Do we want to recognise machines as authors? The creative nature of neural networks is leading some to consider whether it might be worth changing current US laws that only grant copyright protection for works created by humans.…  ( 6 min )

Plus: How Google is using language models to improve search, and watch Heinz's AI ketchup advert In-brief  Another day, another rogue AI chatbot on the internet.…  ( 5 min )

Not only is the AMD EPYC performance looking real good for Linux 6.0, but many of the scheduler changes and common kernel improvements also carry over well for Intel's Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" server processors too. For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some initial benchmarks looking at Linux 5.19 stable compared to Linux 6.0 Git as we approach the end of the merge window...  ( 5 min )

Being prepared for Ubuntu 22.10 and presumably will be back-ported in future Ubuntu 22.04 LTS point releases is the systemd-hwe package to more easily deal with updated hardware rules as part of new device enablement...  ( 5 min )

Following yesterday's belated release of Wine 7.15, Wine-Staging 7.15 is now available that continues to carry hundreds of extra testing/experimental patches atop upstream Wine for bug fixes and other features to empower Windows games and applications on Linux...  ( 5 min )

Those on rolling-release Linux distributions that are quick to adapt to new toolchain updates are finding Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) enabled games breaking when running on the recently released Glibc 2.36. The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH...  ( 5 min )

Sundays are for using a gyroscope to rehabilitate your ailing wrist. Before you rotate, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things). Read more  ( 17 min )

As a non-player, the trailer for Final Fantasy 14's Patch 6.2, Buried Memory, is indistinguishable from every other patch trailer. There's enormous boss monsters, several types of void, an incongruous cat creature, Death maybe... Where it differs is that there are also a few glimpses of the Island Sanctuary, FFXIV's new solo farming content. Watch it below ahead of the newly announced release date: August 23rd. Read more  ( 16 min )

Gothic was one of those PC games I dismissed as being for nerds. Me? I was too busy making Half-Life levels and reading Championship Manager fanfic to be interested in some game about mages in a hole. I've since realised the errors of my ways, and I quite fancy the chance to correct my previous wrongs via the Gothic 1 remake. There's a new trailer for it and its big modern hole below. Read more  ( 16 min )

Audacity is an incredibly useful tool for quick audio edits. Here's how you can install it on Linux and use it for audio recording and background noise removal.  ( 24 min )

THQ Nordic announced Jagged Alliance 3 during their September showcase last year. It's only fitting that it returned during this year's showcase, bringing a much more detailed trailer to show off how combat will work. Read more  ( 16 min )

Outcast 2: A New Beginning was announced last September with a cinematic trailer. We got a glimpse of the game itself this week, including jetpacking, combat, and Cutter Slade's thick eyebrows. Read more  ( 16 min )

That rumbling you hear over the horizon is not exactly Gamescom looming nearer; it's the rumbling of the tummies of video games bloggers anticipating eating spiralised potatoes and hot dogs from a food van outside the venue. Less than two weeks to go! But before then, we will see QuakeCon next week. And before then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on! Read more  ( 17 min )

Wine 7.15 is out a day late as the newest development snapshot of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine is also what serves as the base for Valve's Proton that powers Steam Play...  ( 4 min )

With the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors most exciting about these Zen 3+ SoCs has been the energy efficiency improvements and moving from Vega to RDNA2 graphics as with the Radeon 680M found on the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U that I have been running many Linux benchmarks on over the past several weeks. For those wondering if it pays off moving to a newer Linux kernel or Mesa version with Radeon 680M integrated graphics, here are some reference benchmarks I recently conducted...  ( 5 min )

Sent out this morning is a Linux kernel "fix" that now enabled STIBP when using the IBPB mode for Retbleed mitigations on AMD processors. In other words, more protections needed for this enhanced mode of Retbleed mitigation...  ( 5 min )

Last week was the main set of RISC-V updates for Linux 6.0 that included improving Svpbmt support, a more robust default kernel configuration, and other improvements. A secondary set of RISC-V CPU architecture updates has now been merged for Linux 6.0...  ( 5 min )

It's been another busy summer week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing within this open-source desktop stack...  ( 4 min )

A number of changes were merged into Linux 6.0 for benefiting virtualization when making use of VirtIO...  ( 4 min )

Wine is a compatibility layer that aims to let you run games and applications designed for Windows on Linux and a new release version 7.15 is out now.  ( 4 min )

Need more games to fill up your library? Humble Bundle have put up another one that looks pretty good with the Tactical Combat Bundle. So here's what to expect on Linux desktop and Steam Deck.  ( 4 min )

With Spider-Man Remastered now available on Steam after previously being PlayStation exclusive, I took it for a spin on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.  ( 4 min )

A new story and gameplay trailer for Outcast 2: A New Beginning was shown during THQ Nordic's digital showcase yesterday. The sequel is in development at Appeal Studios which developed the original title. Set 20 years after the original game, in it, you play as ex-Navy SEAL Cutter Slade who has returned to the alien world of Adelpha. Read more  ( 15 min )

A release date has been set for Final Fantasy 14 Online patch 6.2, Buried Memory. Releasing August 23, provided during the latest Letter from the Producer Live broadcast presented by producer and director Naoki Yoshida, the news was accompanied by a new trailer and information on the latest chapter that includes fresh battle challenges and the Island Sanctuary. During the broadcast, Yoshida offered viewers a demonstration of Island Sanctuary, a new type of casual solo content that allows you to build and customize your own farm on a deserted island. You will do this by gathering materials, building facilities, caring for creatures, and more, without the need for prior crafting or gathering experience. Read more  ( 15 min )

Digital Foundry has given Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered a go on PC, and to help you get the best experience, a chart featuring recommended Optimized Settings was provided. If you head over through the link, you will see the chart, as well as a breakdown of how each setting affects the game for good or ill. On PC, Marvel's Spider-Man features ray-traced reflections with varying quality levels, one of which is a new, higher-quality ray-traced mode that offers even more city detail. Read more  ( 15 min )

THQ Nordic has released a new trailer for Gothic Remake that takes you into the Old Mine, a place that would be terrible for a picnic. In development with Alkimia Interactive, the team’s focus and ambition is to build high-quality remake of the RPG which is set to be released for PC and next-gen consoles. In December 2019, THQ Nordic released a playable Gothic remake prototype asking for public opinion on a possible modern remake of the classic RPG. The playable teaser appeared in the Steam Library of everyone who owned a game from Piranha Bytes. Read more  ( 15 min )

The upcoming Early Access period for Victorian-style fantasy game Nightingale has been delayed. The game's developer, Inflexion Games, stated the reason behind the delay was a switch to Unreal Engine 5. Because of the switch, the game will now go into Early Access sometime in 2023. “We’ve made the difficult decision to delay Nightingale’s Early Access release to the first half of 2023,” said Inflexion in the statement. “We’ll have more news on specific timing at a later stage.” Read more  ( 16 min )

During its showcase yesterday, THQ Nordic closed the stream by teasing the next South Park game. Further details were not provided, but when the teaser was shown, you could hear Randy Marsh yelling "hot hot hot hot" in the background. I wonder how many courics it was this time? This isn't the first bit of news we've heard regarding a new South Park game in development. Read more  ( 15 min )

Friday is done and dusted. Everyone has clocked out, ran out the door as fast as possible, and jumped into their cars or ran to catch the next train home. Hopefully, the traffic or the ride wasn't too bad on the commute home. Now that folks have arrived at their domicile, it's time to kick off the shoes, change into some sweats or yoga pants (even just skivvies - we don't judge!), grab some beer or wine, fire up the console or PC and gave a nice sit down to take their weekly frustrations out by playing a game or two. That's what we're doing anyway, and here's what we're playing: Read more  ( 16 min )

Yes, it’s getting towards the middle of August, but that doesn’t mean the big summer of game announcements is over yet – last night (August 12) we saw THQ Nordic take to the airwaves to show off a selection of new games, including a brand new Alone in the Dark reboot. Founded in 2011, THQ Nordic is an Austrian video game publisher and developer that has been snapping up the rights to game properties and IP across the world, as well as funding its own studios to create new series. Developers like Black Forest Games, Bugbear Entertainment, Gunfire Games, HandyGames, Piranha Bytes, Purple Lamp Studios, Rainbow Studios and many more besides fit under the THQ Nordic umbrella, working on internationally renowned series like Wreckfest, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Destory All Humans! The publisher is known for not just sticking to one style, too – whether you’re into motorsport, action-adventure, RPGs, or whatever else, there’s likely something you’ll be interested in coming from THQ Nordic. The publisher said itself that it wanted to "land a massive punch" with this showcase – and with Wreckreation and Alone in the Dark, it seems that mission was accomplished. Read more  ( 16 min )

Sötebrödsdagarna ser ut att vara över, men AMD trotsar trenden och kniper marknadsandelar.  ( 6 min )

När temperaturerna dalar och löven skiftar färg, växlar hårdvaruföretagen upp. Berätta vilka lanseringar och komponenter du ser fram emot!  ( 5 min )

Med en ny uppdatering ska minnestestet kunna peka på precis var felet ligger, förutsatt att systemet i fråga använder Intels "Alder Lake" med DDR5-minne.  ( 5 min )

Intel has changed the prize pool in its GPU-focused scavenger hunt to include an alternative Core i5-12600K or Core i7-12700K prize for the original Arc A750 and A770 prizes.  ( 59 min )

From an MSRP of $999 to astronomical crypto-boom era prices nearing $2,000, multiple Radeon RX 6900 XT options are now available for $699.  ( 59 min )

All of today's desktop CPU benchmarks compared, including Intel's 12th-Gen Core series and AMD's Ryzen Zen 3 and Threadripper.  ( 85 min )

Using the free audio editor, Audacity, learn how to restore old recordings and improve audio clarity.  ( 63 min )

The Ikki68 Aurora R2 is an excellent, mid-tier custom keyboard kit. It’s on the pricier side, especially for its lack of battery, but for that money, you get exceptional customization to ensure you find the typing experience you’re looking for. It looks, sounds, and feels great to type on.  ( 70 min )

The person responsible for putting PT onto the Sony storefront - as well as having to take it back off again - has spoken about the situation for the first time. Pearl Lai, who was Konami's first-party lead at the time, took to Twitter to talk candidly - and diplomatically - about the time the free-to-play Silent Hills teaser was controversially pulled from the Sony store eight years ago yesterday (12th August). "Fun fact: since I was the first-party lead at the time at Konami, I helped get this product set up on the storefronts, fake publisher and everything," they tweeted (thanks, VGC). Read more  ( 16 min )

Producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi has parted ways with Capcom after 27 years. Whilst Kobayashi left Capcom on 1st March 2022, he chose 12th August - his 50th birthday - to make the announcement that he had left the famed Japanese company to take up another producer position at NetEase. "Today, 12th August, is my 50th birthday," Kobayashi's statement begins. "As such, I would like to share something very special with everyone: After serving 27 years with gratitude, I have departed from Capcom on 1st March and will be officially joining NetEase as a producer. Read more  ( 15 min )

Nintendo has confirmed that it has no plans to increase the price of its Nintendo Switch console. Despite a drop in sales of around 23 per cent year-on-year - chiefly due to the tech industry's ongoing shortage of semiconductor parts stifling manufacturing - Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told Nikkei that Nintendo wanted to "avoid pricing people out". "We're not considering [a price increase] at this point, for two reasons," Furukawa said (thanks, NME). "In order to offer unique entertainment to a wide range of customers, we want to avoid pricing people out. Our competition is the variety of entertainment in the world, and we always think about pricing in terms of the value of the fun we offer. Read more  ( 15 min )

It looks like a lot of Phasmophobia players hope to see smaller maps in upcoming updates. In a poll in the game's subreddit community and spotted by PCGN, players were invited to vote on the next map they would like to see join the Phasmophobia rotation. Options include a circus/carnival, mall/movie theatre, manufacturing plant, office park/corporate building, and a small town square. Whilst thousands of players have voted on their preference, some took to the comments to talk about the size those hypothetical maps could be, and posited that smaller maps were important, too. Read more  ( 16 min )

Diablo Immortal players are reporting a new bug that is "reducing XP for everyone". A thread on the game's subreddit community - complete with examples and screenshots - is claiming that "there’s a bug that reduces the XP earned on a significant portion of kills and XP globes". "We don’t fully understand why or when it will happen," explains u/staplepies (thanks, NME), who's one of five players "looking at this on and off for the last month or so". Read more  ( 16 min )

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands' fourth DLC chapter, Shattering Spectreglass, is out now, "expanding the endgame experience" with a new class, better character creation options, a new boss, and "incredible loot". Available for no extra cost for those who already own the season pass - and to buy separately for those who don't - Shattering Spectreglass ushers in the all-new Blightcaller class which "allows players to harness the noxious essence of swamps with potent precision, alongside new ways to customise your Fatemaker, including an all-new voice". "Shattering Spectreglass begins in Dreamveil Overlook, where players will face Vesper’s most personal Mirror of Mystery yet," 2K explains. "Shattering Spectreglass offers a window into Vesper's memories, which are plagued by visions of Redmourne the Trivern, a mighty beast that can grow multiple heads and feeds on fear, siphoning his power from lost souls. Bringing down this winged behemoth once and for all is the only way to help Vesper escape her past." Read more  ( 16 min )

THQ Nordic rounded out its 2022 Showcase by teasing a new South Park game. "As of today, THQ Nordic (HandyGames not included) has 43 games in development. Thereof 26 still unannounced AFTER this showcase," the broadcast confirmed at the end of the presentation. "Thank you for watching." Moments later, though, the 26 is crossed out, and the text fades to the South Park Digital Studios logo - head to 55min and 11secs on the video below to see for yourself: Read more  ( 15 min )

NBA 2K23 is inviting you to "experience Michael Jordan's most iconic moments" in its upcoming Jordan Challenge mode. The game mode will include 15 "playable moments from Jordan's career that let players relive his legacy from the early days as a college sensation, to his game-winning shot in the 1998 NBA Finals". Each challenge will include a pre-game interview with a "luminary who was part of what made every game special" and a new presentation package that recreates how the games would've looked as they were originally broadcast in the 80s and 90s. Read more  ( 16 min )

PUBG: Battlegrounds has clocked up 80,000 new players daily since going free-to-play earlier this year. Confirming the new figures in its latest financial report, developer/publisher Krafton confirmed that net profit for the company was up 37 per cent when compared with the same quarter last year, even though both operating profit and revenue were down by 6.9 per cent and 7.8 per cent respectively. 94 per cent of the battle royale's revenue is generated outside of South Korea, where the game is made. Read more  ( 16 min )

Dealmaster also has the Xbox Series S, Apple Watch Series 7, and Nvidia Shield TV.  ( 9 min )

The book The Short Story of the Universe really does have it all.  ( 5 min )

Researchers have proposed a variety of theories to explain symptoms of COVID long-haulers.  ( 6 min )

Gamerkläder för tjejer på Space  ( 6 min )

I afton sekt.  ( 6 min )

Vågar du vara ensam i mörkret?  ( 6 min )

Polera trollstavarna och ta fram kvastarna.  ( 6 min )

Polera trollstavarna och ta fram kvastarna.  ( 6 min )

FDA says yes to the tests AI software capable of mapping tumor tissue more accurately to help surgeons treat and shrink prostate cancer using a laser-powered needle will soon be tested in real patients during clinical trials.…  ( 5 min )

Tl;DR - the news isn't good Black Hat In Brief  Victor Zhora, Ukraine's lead cybersecurity official, made an unannounced visit to Black Hat in Las Vegas this week, where he spoke to attendees about the state of cyberwarfare in the country's conflict with Russia. The picture Zhora painted was bleak.…  ( 8 min )

Don't have the budget or customer base for Graviton-class silicon? Intel thinks it can help In a quest to deliver better application performance and greater efficiency, many software and hardware vendors are turning to custom silicon to achieve their goals.…  ( 5 min )

Six years on web devs finally settle on sensor privacy defenses Six years after web security and privacy concerns surfaced about ambient light sensors in mobile phones and notebooks, browser boffins have finally implemented defenses.…  ( 5 min )

There goes the weekend... A high-severity Palo Alto Networks denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been exploited by miscreants looking to launch DDoS attacks, and several of the affected products won't have a patch until next week.…  ( 5 min )

Once the modchip plans are live, you can, too Black Hat  A security researcher has shown how to, with physical access at least, fully take over a Starlink satellite terminal using a homemade modchip.…  ( 5 min )

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic  ( 5 min )

The all-consuming IP hoover that is THQ Nordic has done a showcase! Mixing a nostalgia-baiting slate of 90s revivals with some intriguing newcomers, it was a surprisingly busy one too. So if you missed it and find yourself eager for updates on previously announced titles like Outcast 2, Jagged Alliance 3, and Gothic, plus some big new reveals - most notably the return of Alone in the Dark - read on. Alone in the Dark As rumoured, the grandaddy of survival horror is back in what THQ Nordic and developer Pieces Interactive is calling a "reimagining" of the 1992 original. It's being written and directed by Mikael Hedberg, who wrote the stunning Soma at Frictional Games, and is coming to Xbox, PlayStation, and PC at a later date. We've got a little more on this promising project elsewhere. Read more  ( 18 min )

UK developer Three Fields Entertainment - the studio behind the likes of Dangerous Golf and Dangerous Driving - has unveiled Wreckreaction, a new custom-content-focused open-world racer coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox next year. Three Fields - a studio founded by a small group of ex-Criterion developers - describes Wreckreaction as a game of high-speed racing, crashing, stunts, and exploration, all of which unfolds across a 400-square-mile map. That map is designed to represent an entire (fictitious) American state split into four areas, albeit one predominantly themed around woodland, grassland, and sandy beaches. As to how players approach the challenges within Wreckreaction's world, the idea is that it's entirely up to them, with Three Fields saying it wants to encourage a more freeform style of fun as players explore the world in search of races, short cuts, and challenges. Read more  ( 15 min )

Mirage Game Studios - the developer behind well-received factory sim Little Big Workshop - has shared a first look at its adorable galactic property magnate game Space for Sale, which is due to launch on PC at a currently undisclosed date. Space for Sale casts players in the role of a cute astronaut that's just bought an entire galaxy on the cheap, with the aim of turning it into a dream destination for alien homeseekers across the cosmos. To reach that goal, players must scour the galaxy's procedural planets in search of the perfect spot to fulfil their clients' sometimes eccentric needs. Although Space for Sale's basic concept sounds very management sim, Mirage says the game's sandbox-style gameplay is more of a "hands-on experience" than that might suggest, with players needing to explore each planet in person as they hunt down the ideal location to drop a plot, construct buildings, collect resources, scan items, and so on. Read more  ( 15 min )

THQ Nordic is 'reimagining' survival horror classic Alone in the Dark, with Soma and Amnesia: The Dark Descent writer Mikael Hedberg at the helm. Alone in the Dark, for those too young to remember, is widely considered to be the granddaddy of the survival horror genre, with the 1992 original pioneering the fixed-camera spook-house formula that would go on to influence the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. THQ Nordic's reimagined version of Alone in the Dark - which is being handled by Swedish developer Pieces Interactive - takes the basic premise of the 1992 original, in which private detective Edward Carnby helps Emily Hartwood investigate her uncle's suicide at the gloomy Derceto Mansion, and shakes it up a little for modern audiences. Read more  ( 16 min )

Developer Nixxes patched Marvel's Spider-Man a couple of hours before embargo on Wednesday, setting back our PC tech review, but the update was worth it and while a little more polish is required to get the game fully into shape, the release you'll be playing today definitely hits the spot. We've already covered the PC version in broad brush strokes, but today we can get a little more granular and offer up our optimised settings for delivering the best balance between performance and fidelity. Let's quickly recap on what we've already discussed - and it's mostly great stuff. First of all, I like the graphics configuration menu that appears before you run the game - it's a Nixxes (and IO Interactive!) hallmark that gives you an instant 'at a glance' look at the options available and allows for friction-free settings changes outside of the game. Those settings include fully realised support for practically any aspect ratio, plus configurable field of view. Not only that, but the game's full-screen support includes actual exclusive full-screen, allowing for resolutions and refresh rates outside of the desktop options - a rare thing in PC gaming today. Also impressive is how the in-game options menu actually works. Pause the game at any time and any tweaks you make are instantly deployed, allowing you to see the changes you've made in real-time. In a world where some problematic PC titles don't do this and can even require you to restart the game, this is excellent. On paper, all of the things I've praised here should be standard and second nature to PC developers but unfortunately that's not the case. Where Nixxes excels is where ports like Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII or Halo Infinite flounder, sometimes spectacularly so. Read more  ( 20 min )

Patch 6.2 for Final Fantasy 14 - named Buried Memory - will release on 23rd August. The update will add a fresh batch of story missions, as well as a farming sim mode called Island Sanctuary. An epic new trailer for the patch includes plenty of gameplay (and Endwalker story spoilers) from across the update, and some cute dancing Loporrits - moon bunnies for the uninitiated. Read more  ( 15 min )

Play as Master Chief in Yakuza 0 thanks to the power of modder Kashiiera. The mod, uploaded earlier this week, replaces usual protagonist Kiryu Kazuma with Halo's poster boy Master Chief. Specifically his incarnation in Halo 3. Kashiiera is primarily a Halo modder as it's their favourite franchise, but they also love Yakuza and so worked hard to project Master Chief's model correctly onto Kiryu's to keep him looking as natural as possible. Read more  ( 15 min )

An upcoming VR game from Changingday is specifically designed for autistic players, and will allow users to "play at their own pace" while "[supporting] them through everyday experiences". Blinnk and the Vacuum of Space starts off on the first day of your new job at Norp Corp. However, your new boss, a certain Mister Norp, is a hungry chap, with only one demand. You must bring him "the greatest sandwich in the galaxy". This may all sound easy enough, I mean how hard can bread and filling be? Well, it turns out it can be a lot harder than you may expect, especially when robot companion Blinnk is involved. Read more  ( 15 min )

Capcom has announced it will have two livestream presentations as part of Tokyo Games Show this year. The first will be on 15th September (3pm UK time) and will include "all the latest Capcom news in our pre-recorded stream". The second will follow on 16th September and focus solely on Street Fighter 6. Read more  ( 15 min )

Let me keep this brief, as I have a wash on - a wash full of briefs! Arcade Paradise is a game about running a laundrette - at first it is anyway. It's one of those jobs a lot of us start out in even if you don't, as is the case here, have a family in the laundrette biz. You run the laundrette, day by day, bussing in and out. You collect trash, you wash and fold clothes, you unclog the toilet and empty the coin hopper in the tokens machine. You put the laundrette's income in the safe and you chat to your friends on a messenger app accessed via the 56k set-up in the back office. But in another back room there are arcade games - cabinets with playable games! It's like opening a door and finding that aliens have landed. You can play these games - play clever spins on match-three, on Mr Driller, on plenty of others - but you can also earn money from them too. You can collect the money in their coin hoppers and whack that in the safe. And what if all this money you're collecting, what if you used it to expand? To buy new cabinets, to create more room to store them in? Onwards. So Arcade Paradise moves on, in step with the rolling Katamari of commerce and capitalism. More, brighter, shinier. But also quicker, more efficient. More free time in the day is opened up by the right upgrades, so that the time, along with the money, can be reinvested. Read more  ( 17 min )

Bungie has detailed some of the changes that are coming to Destiny 2. In its weekly blog post, or TWAB, the company explained some of the weapon balance changes players can expect, which includes buffing some of the game's under-utilised weapon archetypes. For example, lightweight bows will get faster draw times as well as an increased "perfect draw" window to make things a bit easier for players. Read more  ( 15 min )

Unity, known for its popular game engine, revealed it has signed an "exciting three-year multi-million dollar contract" with CACI International in its latest financial results. CACI International, for context, is an IT company which provides technology to various US federal and state government agencies. Marc Whitten, senior vice president at Unity and general manager of Unity Create, explained Unity's role in the contract as "defining human machine interfaces or HMI for aerospace applications and beyond" in the company's follow-up earnings call, as reported by Bloomberg. Read more  ( 15 min )

It's another Friday and another Weekly - the show that recaps and discusses the week on Eurogamer for you. And remember, premium supporters of Eurogamer get these episodes every Friday, whereas everyone else listens from Monday. Today on Weekly, news reporter Ed Nightingale talks about running a university of his own in Two-Point Campus, which he really liked. And we hear from Christian Donlan about a game I've been really looking forward to, Cult of the Lamb. Spoiler: it's good. But Christian is more excited about the game he's reviewing now - a game called Arcade Paradise. It's a game about running a laundrette but also an arcade within it, which, with time and careful management, will grow into the main attraction. Read more  ( 14 min )

Destiny 2 cheat maker AimJunkies has fired back at Bungie, issuing subpoenas to obtain information to back up that its work isn't copyright infringement. Earlier this year, Bungie alleged copyright infringement and breach of contract against AimJunkies for its Destiny 2 "hacks", but the court dismissed much of the case. Bungie was allowed more time to reinstate its case and a few weeks later alleged that AimJunkies had reverse-engineered and copied the software code for Destiny 2. Read more  ( 15 min )

Recently I have been in one of those periods where no video game will do, where I have chased a game - a something - across download libraries and subscription catalogues and a couple of cupboard drawers in vain, a quest across gaming's ribcage and shoulder blades for some roaming, ineffable itch that I cannot scratch. I suspect I'm not alone in this one, though, so if you ever find yourself in the same spot, may I suggest: the mop-up. The mop-up has many forms. For me, somewhat uncreatively, it's the task of completing a "living 'dex" in Pokémon - catching one of every Pokémon ever released and storing them all, in order, in one place, including all the many different forms and stages of each evolution. This makes it a bit more long-winded than completing a regular regional or national Pokédex, because you couldn't just catch, say, one Abra and then evolve it into Kadabra, then Alakazam, crossing off all three at once - you need one of each in your possession simultaneously. The challenge is really besides the point, though. A good mop-up, I reckon, will always have a few common elements. One is that it happens, by definition, at the end of a game you've broadly completed - think finishing sidequests, bumping off the last surviving enemies on a given list, wiping the final factions off a map, et cetera. Read more  ( 18 min )

Infinity Ward, the team behind Modern Warfare 2, has given us all a little peek at a new map that is coming to the game. The map, which is called Farm 18, was inspired by Modern Warefare's Shoothouse map. "We tried to think of hidden training facilities, but it is also in an industrial cement factory," explained Geoff Smith, the director of multiplayer map design on Modern Warfare 2. Read more  ( 15 min )

A new Avatar game has been announced. No, not that one. This is Avatar: Generations, based on the popular Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. (Your release date got pushed back? That's rough, buddy.) The game is being developed by Square Enix London Mobile in partnership with Navigator Games, and is described as a "free-to-play, RPG adventure". At release, the game will follow the main gang (Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Suki, Zuko, Appa and Momo) across the storyline of the series. New stories are promised too, as well as "fan-favourite locations, stories, and events in an open world". Subsequent updates will feature other minor characters from The Last Airbender such as Avatar Kyoshi, as well as characters and storylines from Avatar: The Legend of Korra. Read more  ( 15 min )

Splatoon 2 players will be given bonuses when transferring save data to Splatoon 3. Nintendo's Splatoon 3 Direct earlier this week detailed what's new in the game, but a note on the official website states that save data can be transferred and players will receive in-game rewards for doing so. Apparently "five out of five Squid Research Lab scientists recommend transferring data from Splatoon 2 if you have it". So that's that. Read more  ( 15 min )

Following its recent delay, a new release date for Warner Bros.' Smash-like brawler MultiVersus' first season has been announced. Welcomely, the new release date is actually really soon. In fact, it is as soon as 15th August. This also means that Morty will soon be joining the fray. His arrival to the game will be a little after season one's debut, with the new fighter now coming on 23rd August. Read more  ( 15 min )

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: donuts, imps, and stealth Destiny. If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive. Donut County is a game about controlling a sink hole. You move around encouraging parts of the landscape to fall into it, and over time the hole gets bigger so you can encourage bigger things to fall into it. Read more  ( 17 min )

WashBear Studio's charming, thoroughly enjoyable dinosaur park management sim Parkasaurus is looking to wow guests with a whole new, decidedly more acquatic, selection of exhibits from today, 11th August, with the arrival of its new Sea Monsters DLC on PC. Building on Parkasaurus' core management action - which takes obvious inspiration from the likes of Theme Park and DinoPark Tycoon - the new Sea Monsters DLC introduces 11 aquatic reptiles and fish, as well as corresponding flooded enclosures, for players to install on their quest to create the ultimate dino-flavoured tourist attraction. If you're looking for specifics, those new dinos are Elasmosaurus, Plesiosaurus, Mosasaurus, Atopodentatus, Sarcosuchus, Archelon, Dunkleosteus, Liopleurodon, Ichthyosaurus, Placodus, and Megalodon. But Sea Monsters also introduces three new campaign missions, three new biomes, and 20+ exhibit items and hats - all of which will cost £5.19/$6.99 USD on Steam. Read more  ( 15 min )

Company insists it's doing so 'to honor people’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) choices' Meta's Instagram and Facebook apps on iOS devices have been injecting JavaScript code into third-party websites from their custom in-app browser, gaining access to data that would be unavailable were those pages loaded in a stand-alone, WebKit-based iOS browser.…  ( 6 min )

Don't feed the trolls? Users deem policy an attack on conservatives, dystopian, and election manipulation Twitter has announced its plans to fight misinformation during the 2022 US midterm elections, including activating its Civic Integrity Policy (CIP).…  ( 5 min )

Fashion Police chipping in on the bounty related to costliest strain of ransomware on record The US government is putting a face on a claimed member of the infamous Conti ransomware group as part of a $10 million reward for information about five of the gang's crew.…  ( 5 min )

The discovery could help scientists further understand the origins of life Moon meteorites found on Earth contain trace gasses that lend further support to the widely held belief that our largest natural satellite formed from chunks of our planet that were ejected in a massive impact.…  ( 4 min )

Another $13.7m handed out to researchers, but then again it does have an awful lot of attack surfaces Microsoft appears to have beat Google on the bug bounty front, with $13.7 million in rewards spread out over 335 researchers.…  ( 5 min )

Well, more like 4G LTE right now, and you'll probably need someone to put up the radio Amazon Web Services has waded into the private mobile network marketplace with AWS Private 5G.…  ( 4 min )

26,000 engineers and call center operators to down tools again this month The union representing upset BT workers has served notice on the one-time UK state owned telco that tens of thousands of engineers and call center operators will down tools for two more days of strikes this month.…  ( 5 min )

Latest shine on the Jammy Jellyfish brings ton of fixes to keep you working smoothly The first point-release of the newest Ubuntu is here, which marks the stage it formally becomes the new long-term-support release.…  ( 5 min )

Repurposes logic originally used for spotting variations in voltage, timing in older circuits to help performance Black Hat  Intel has disclosed how it may be able to protect systems against some physical threats by repurposing circuitry originally designed to counter variations in voltage and timing that may occur as silicon circuits age.…  ( 5 min )

Ad behemoth committed to 'providing the most helpful products possible' Google is being ordered to pay A$60 million ($42.5 million) in penalties to Australia's competition and national consumer law regulator regarding the collection and use of location data on Android phones.…  ( 5 min )

Advanced's infrastructure still down and out, recovery to take weeks or more Advanced, the MSP forced to shut down some of its servers last week after identifying an "issue" with its infrastructure hosting products, has confirmed a ransomware attack and says recovery will be in the order of weeks.…  ( 5 min )

A new Windows esport event: Opening Outlook Outlook sometimes goes wrong and even Microsoft occasionally can't work out why, judging by a freshly published Microsoft 365 support article.…  ( 4 min )

Hello customer, can I help you? Ha ha, just kidding, of course I won’t Something for the Weekend  "That's it! I've had enough of this! I'm leaving!"…  ( 8 min )

No Clippy, though, and that philosophy only seems to go so far Microsoft open-sourced most of its emoji library this week.…  ( 4 min )

Termin-what? Why can't I connect directly to the network On Call  Is a Loose Cannon worse than a Big Cheese? What happens when the two are combined? Stir in some overconfidence and you have today's entry in the On Call archives.…  ( 5 min )

OSIRIS-Rex saw this happening. An odd meteorite suggests why and how In 2019, scientists clocked something they'd never seen before: an asteroid named Bennu appeared to be popping off swarms of pebbles. Research published Thursday may go some way to explain why.…  ( 4 min )

The renewed agreement more than doubles the DoD's deal with Joby Aviation A flying taxi company with plans to take to the skies by 2024 has just received a $45 million cash infusion from the United States Department of Defense to explore military applications.…  ( 5 min )

Some got so cranky waiting they made a t-shirt celebrating the 'CLOUD-6999' Jira ticket On July 8, 2011, Atlassian Cloud posted a Jira ticket titled "Allow custom domains for Cloud apps".…  ( 4 min )

But warns 'upcoming major release of vSphere' will break some plugins It's not often that a double dot release of a product adds significant functionality, but VMware did just that on Thursday with version 4.4.1 of its Cloud Director Availability product, which adds the ability to migrate aged and unsupported versions of vCenter to the cloud.…  ( 4 min )

Required customers to pay for software they did not receive, among other sins Australia’s Federal Court has voided 34,000 contracts that Fuji Xerox’s local outposts offered to local small business customers, after they were found to be unfair in many ways.…  ( 4 min )

Time to call in the legal team Black Hat  Dylan Ayrey, a bug hunter and CEO of Truffle Security, discovered a big data company credential dump containing personal information belonging to about 50,000 of its users, and still hasn't fixed it. …  ( 5 min )

Got thoughts on the online panopticon? The FTC wants to hear The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday announced an effort to formulate privacy rules to deter unwelcome online monitoring and shoddy data security.…  ( 6 min )

Most organizations don’t have the financial resources necessary to address ransomware and other cyberattacks, BlackBerry says Black Hat  Many organizations are increasingly unprepared to deal with the skyrocketing costs of a ransomware attacks, at a time when the number of incidents and the payments demanded by cybercriminals are rising rapidly.…  ( 5 min )

'Until someone has to go to jail for doing it wrong the teeth are not going to be the same' Black Hat video  The security industry needs to take a leaf from the manual of an industry where smart incident response is literally life and death, if it is to fix systemic problems.…  ( 5 min )

It can move without anything to push off from, but only via curved spacetime A team of scientists from Georgia Tech say they've built a robot that can move without anything to push against - a discovery that seems to violate the law of conservation momentum. …  ( 5 min )

If you’ve drooled over the OLED panel in your phone or TV and decided you’d like the same tech for your PC games, you basically have the choice of a single model each from Gigabyte and Alienware. Asus, then, are about to increase the number of OLED gaming monitors on the market by 100%, with the ROG Swift PG48UQ and ROG Swift PG42UQ. And I’ve just had a brief, but generally impressive, play around with them. Read more  ( 17 min )

Of the many games announced during THQ Nordic's Showcase this evening, Space For Sale is the one that caught my eye the most, primarily because it looks a bit like Animal Crossing with aliens. In it, you play a small stubby astronaut who dreams of hitting it big as an intergalactic property developer. Man, they really took the phrase 'colony sim' to its literal extreme, didn't they? Are we sure that isn't Tom Nook under the helmet there? The proportions defintiely seem right, is all I'm saying. I just hope the rent you end up charging isn't... astronommical. Sorry. Here's the reveal trailer. Read more  ( 17 min )

Surprise! Survival horror series Alone In The Dark returns - again! This time it's a reimagining of the original 1992 game, where you'll delve into Derceto Manor as returning characters Emily Hartwood and Edward Carnby in an attempt to figure out what's happened to Hartwood's missing uncle. As you'd expect, it does not go terribly well. But hey, it looks like it makes for a pretty good time. Read more  ( 17 min )

Three Fields Entertainment are responsible for lots of games with "dangerous" in their title: Dangerous Driving, Danger Zone, and Dangerous Golf. But now they've got a new racing game in the works which eschews their previous naming convention for something that'll make you say with a wry smile and a shake of the head, "I see what you did there". It's called Wreckreation (you know, like 'recreation', not Wreck-reaction, or Wreck–eation) and its reveal trailer looks a bit like if Burnout and Hot Wheels went for a joyride together. Read more  ( 17 min )

What qualifies as a "next-gen" RTS game? Is it shinier graphics? More in-depth tactical choices? Well, Ghostrunner and Graven devs Slipgate Ironworks hope to provide an answer with their latest real-time tactics base-building game, Tempest Rising. Revealed earlier this evening during THQ Nordic's summer showcase, Tempest Rising is a retro-inspired strategy game where you'll take control of three factions fighting for a rare mineral. And yep, that mineral is called 'Tempest'. Here's the reveal trailer. Read more  ( 18 min )

As many of you well know, I rather enjoyed cat adventure Stray recently. As an owner of two tortoiseshells myself, it was right up my alley. I do, however, have a confession to make. When I started seeing other real life cats enjoying the game alongside their respective humans, I began to feel sad and a bit left out. You see, my cats Maple and Midna (still!) haven't shown any interest in Stray whatsoever, not even flicking up their ears in response to the cat's in-game meow. I'm not gonna lie, it kinda broke my heart a little bit. However, I'm beginning to think their (clear and apparent) hatred of video games goes further than simple disinterest. I was playing A Plague Tale: Requiem for the first time last week, a game famous for its swarms of screeching rats, and STILL nothing. They love hunting rats and bringing them home to leave as little presents for us on our back door step. Heck, they'll even wig out and go into prowl mode when they hear them scrabbling away underneath our floorboards (yes, we do have a rat problem in our house). But clearly, their ice cold little murder hearts are unmoved by their video game equivalents. Is this what it's like when your children reject your hobbies and go and sulk in their rooms for the rest of the day? Because it sure does feel like it. Read more  ( 16 min )

"Metroidvania" is a terrible phrase that gets in the way of its own definition and I hate it. It does, however, still apply to Zapling Bygone. Describing it in less mechanical terms could make it sound creepy. You're a spore of an all-consuming hivemind, dropped on an unfamiliar planet to assimilate it. You move by skittering about on wobbly green tentacles, leaping and climbing and clinging and lashing out at living things with them, then absorbing the green muck that bursts out, and periodically consuming a creature powerful enough to be worth assimilating. And wearing its skull in the centre of your tentacle mass, because why not. Read more  ( 15 min )

Turn-based tactical RPG Metal Slug Tactics has been delayed. Saying that "the squad needs a bit more time in the shop to prepare for the battles ahead," the publisher has announced that it'll now be coming out in 2023. Read more  ( 16 min )

Infinity Ward have shared a small peek at an upcoming Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 map, Farm 18. The TikTok mostly gives some design details from a couple of the developers who worked on it, but does also show about five seconds of gameplay at the beginning. Read more  ( 16 min )

Pixel art Souls-like Moonscars has announced that it'll be releasing on September 27th. Protagonist Grey Irma will set off into a gorgeous world to search for the sculptor who made her and find answers to her existence. And also to absolutely whack some monsters with a gigantic sword along the way. Read more  ( 16 min )

With the Netflix Resident Evil series going down like a blood-filled lead balloon, you may be thinking it's high time you revisited the Resident Evil games to wipe the show from your memory banks. Handily, Humble have a pretty good Resident Evil bundle going on right now, which nets you 11 Resident Evil games - including the excellent Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 7 - for a very agreeable £24.70. It runs from now until August 24th, and is raising money in support of charity Direct Relief and their efforts to help the people of Ukraine. Read more  ( 17 min )

Crossover fanfiction Smash-like MultiVersus has announced that its previously delayed season one and battle pass will be launching on Monday, August 15th. Morty, also previously delayed, will be making his debut on August 23rd, and other new additions are planned throughout the season. Read more  ( 16 min )

Players checking out anime gacha MMO Tower Of Fantasy have been running into some strange bugs. Though the server issues that were being experienced at launch seem to be mostly fixed, other glitches are now being uncovered, not least of which is the ability to turn your character into a cartoon character who fell underneath a steamroller. Read more  ( 16 min )

At today's THQ Nordic 2022 Digital Showcase, developer Pieces Interactive announced an Alone in the Dark reboot, due to release on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC. There's no release date yet, but in a behind-closed-doors preview event, we were told the game is currently in 'pre-alpha' – so don't expect it anytime soon (though it has been in development since 'late 2019'). THQ Nordic's executive producer Michael Paeck says that recent games (like the Resident Evil remakes, Silent Hill titles, and Dead Space) go for ‘terror’ more than 'horror', and the team wants this new title to go back to what made the original 1992 Alone in the Dark special. The team constantly referred to the dense, rich atmosphere of the first game, and how much it wants to recreate that in this new game – some 30 years after the original launched. From a debut trailer we've seen so far, the game seems similar to the Resident Evil remakes Capcom has seen so much success with. It's a complete rethink of the first game, with the SOMA and Amnesia: Dark Descent writer, Mikael Hedberg, coming in to head up the narrative on the the project. Read more  ( 17 min )

Did you know that save data from Splatoon 2 can be transferred to Splatoon 3? Well, now you know. And there's even better news: according to the official Splatoon 3 website, you will also receive save data bonuses. You can transfer save data once per Nintendo Account by launching Splatoon 3 or entering the lobby while connected to the internet. To transfer, and save data from Splatoon 2 must be on the same system with the same user account. Read more  ( 16 min )

No-one is playing Netflix’s games. Well, no, that’s not true – 1% of Netflix subscribers are. But that means that over 200 million people have access to, say, one of the best strategy games out there… and probably don’t even know about it. For the more casual players, interested in less intensive and more cosy affairs, there’s the likes of Poinpy, Krispee Street, and Knittens. If you’re a nut for Stranger Things and have been humming Running Up That Hill and Master of Puppets since the one-two punch of those musical finales, you’ll probably find the likes of Stranger Things 3: The Game and Stranger Things: 1984 both worth your time. But the odds are you don’t even know these games are available as part of your subscription fee. Until I started writing this piece, I didn’t even know how difficult it was to access the games on various platforms – Netflix hasn’t exactly been communicative about promoting them to its still-humongus user base, has it? To make matters more complicated, you can’t play the games via the app, but instead you need to head to the mobile store of your platform of choice (iOS or Android) and download the games from there. Anything viable with your Netflix subscription will be indicated with that trademark red N logo , and listed via a dedicated in-app tab on the homescreen. Clicking that – or finding a relevant game in your storefront of choice – will prompt a Netflix log-in, and from there you can play the game. For free. Read more  ( 18 min )

Hideo Kojima took to Twitter just under an hour ago, and if you were simply doom-scrolling and not reading, you might've felt your heart skip a beat if you're a horror fan. No, Kojima is not sharing any teasers from his upcoming horror project with Xbox. He simply shared the P.T. artwork again. Again, no, there's no new P.T. announcements. It isn't coming back from the dead. In fact, it still isn't even downloadable anywhere unless you're tracking it – or its clones - down by nefarious means. Kojima tweeted that "It's been 8 years", and, well, he isn't wrong. It's been eight years since what could've been the best Silent Hill game – a complete revival for the Konami series from Metal Gear Solid's best – was robbed from us. Fortunately for me, who will not stop rambling on about P.T. and the loss of Silent Hills for the life of me, I've been reminded that I'm not alone. Read more  ( 16 min )

In case you didn't see the sneaky League of Legends leaks that slipped out yesterday, you may be surprised to hear that the jungle role is set to undergo some major changes during the 2023 Pre-season. This includes aids for jungle pathing, jungle camp leashing, and jungle pets which appear to be the answer to stale itemisation in the role. According to the official release for this update, jungle was a role that was actively avoided by a significant number of players. While the goal apparently isn’t to dumb down the role, some areas of difficulty are being reworked to remove this barrier of entry and allow for greater skill expression in other areas. Let start with the pets - by a large margin the most brow-raising addition to the role. While the folks at Riot Games aren’t giving up details on how exactly these will work, we know they’re an answer to the bland blue smite / red smite itemisation. This is being added to make the process of killing jungle camps a bit more exciting - rather than make it a practice of dull minion farming. Read more  ( 16 min )

Earlier this week, we heard about the next batch of games coming to bulk out the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium tiers on Sony’s newly dressed-up subscription service. At first glance, it’s not a bad offering – for owners of PS Plus Extra, you'll be able to pick up three different Yakuza titles (including the best one, Yakuza 0) – but beyond that, there are some glaring issues with this month’s rollout. Sure, these three triple-A RPG games are a fantastic entry point for anyone jostling to get into the series for the first time. You can even come in at the ground floor, play Yakuza 0, and get to know gangland heartthrob Kazuma Kiryu and his stomping grounds of Kabukichō. For the sake of the headline at the top of this piece, this is Good. Being able to play the first three full chapters of the Yakuza series (with the promise of the rest of the saga to come to PS Plus later) is objectively Good. There is nothing Bad, or indeed Ugly, about that. It’s moves like this that keep PS Plus a viable rival to Xbox Game Pass, and halt critics of the service calling it ‘a disaster’. Read more  ( 17 min )

Disclaimer: For legal reasons some of the names of the people involved in this story have been altered. ”Steve,” exclaimed the supply teacher, Miss Personality Vacuum. ”Yes, Miss,” replied Steve. Read more  ( 18 min )

It's been a fairly bumpy road, but finally we have a solid release date for the first proper season of Multiversus: August 15. A statement from the game's official account over on Twitter confirmed the new release date for the multiplatform, Smash-like fighting game, and noted that the next character – the eponymous Morty from Rick and Morty – will be available from August 23. “We’re excited to announce Season 1 will begin on August 15 with a brand-new Battle Pass for you to earn in-game rewards!” says a tweet announcing the new date. “We can also confirm Morty will join the character roster on August 23 as part of Season 1. We look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks!” Read more  ( 16 min )

After Kirby made their grand 3D debut with Kirby and The Forgotten Land, Kirby fans just can't get enough of the positively pink puff ball. So, Nintendo have given keen fans like me exactly what they want in the form of Kirby's Dream Buffet, which has finally had its release date revealed. In a tweet from Nintendo of America, a three-minute gameplay trailer for the title has been shown off, and the release date has been announced for 17 August, 2022. That's just next week! Needless to say, Kirby's 30th Anniversary has gone down a treat this year, and what better way to celebrate than with a game that lets Kirby and friends eat just as many treats as they want and deserve? Read more  ( 16 min )

Intel has contributed support for their oneVPL open-source video processing library to the upstream FFmpeg project for that widely-used, cross-platform multimedia library...  ( 5 min )

While much of the Intel Arc Graphics "Alchemist" (DG2) support appears squared away for Linux 6.0 besides the support still being hidden behind the flag requiring i915.force_probe= to actually enable the experimental support, there still are various DG2 discrete GPU features being tackled by the open-source Intel kernel graphics drivers. One of those "extras" still working its way to the kernel is HWMON subsystem integration to be able to expose power / voltage / energy reporting...  ( 5 min )

Released in June was the Radeon PRO Software for Enterprise 21.Q2 to deliver AMD's enterprise-vetted graphics driver stack to Windows users. Meanwhile recently debuting is the long-awaited adjacent Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise for Linux driver update...  ( 5 min )

The colorful fishy codenames are not over for AMD's Linux driver crew! While on the GPU side they have moved to IP block-by-block enablement strategy for their future GPUs, over on the audio co-processor side AMD posted a series of patches today under the "Pink Sardine" codename...  ( 5 min )

With Mesa 22.2 bringing many new features, you may be curious about how the performance of this next Mesa3D release is looking. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of Mesa 22.2 back from the day it was branched against that of the stock Mesa 22.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 if you have been wondering whether it's worthwhile upgrading... Benchmarks for this article from the current-generation Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.  ( 4 min )

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues showing its a formidable file-system option for flash memory devices, especially SSDs and mobile hardware. With Linux 6.0 there are yet more improvements for this file-system driver...  ( 4 min )

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who works on Zink for OpenGL implemented atop Vulkan has managed some more performance optimizations with the upcoming Mesa 22.2 quarterly feature release...  ( 5 min )

While Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux rolling-release distribution is known for its aggressive performance optimizations, their kernel build had been going with the default "-O2" optimization but last week did switch over to rolling their kernel with -O3...  ( 4 min )

While support for the loongArch Chinese CPU architecture was merged in Linux 5.19, it wasn't actually enough to yield a booting system due to some driver code not yet being finished and ready for merging in time. LoongArch was allowed to merge that preliminary code in v5.19 so the Glibc support could land and now for Linux 6.0 more of the CPU port is ready to hit the kernel...  ( 5 min )

Meanwhile, officials in London reported finding poliovirus over 100 times in sewage.  ( 6 min )

The smallest consumer OLED TV LG makes currently measures 42 inches.  ( 5 min )

Supported or not, new or old, this is everything you need to know.  ( 10 min )

"We're watching stellar evolution in real time."  ( 6 min )

Samsung hasn't changed the Galaxy Fold battery density for four years, and it shows.  ( 5 min )

Plan came after GOP complaints, but FEC says it doesn't violate ban on contributions.  ( 5 min )

Scientists opposed whaling and secretly tracked its toll.  ( 5 min )

Printer makers have a history of invasive practices that hurt user repairability, experience.  ( 6 min )

Lee's ascendancy to Samsung chairman position key to "vitalizing the economy."  ( 5 min )

It's not just Stadia, either; non-Google streaming rivals also get featured.  ( 5 min )

"One of the questions that we’re getting a lot is, 'How full are you guys?'"  ( 7 min )

Want a smartphone but don't want to spend $1,000? We've got you covered.  ( 8 min )

Unvaccinated people no longer need to quarantine and physical distancing is de-emphasized.  ( 6 min )

Think you're too smart to be fooled by a phisher? Think again.  ( 6 min )

Company with notable footage-sharing issues wants to do it more, but funny.  ( 5 min )

The last day The first lesson I would like everybody to know and have is to buy two machines, especially a machine to check low blood pressure. I had actually ordered one from Amazon but they never delivered. I hope to sue them in consumer court in due course of time. The other one is a blood sugar machine which I ordered and did get, but the former is more important than the latter, and the reason why will be known soon. Mum had stopped eating solids and was entirely on liquids for the last month of her life. I did try enticing her however I could with aromatic food but failed. Add to that we had weird weather this entire year. June is supposed to be when the weather turns and we have gentle showers, but this whole June it felt like we were in an oven. She asked for liquids whenever…  ( 17 min )

I run Debian on my laptop (obviously); but occasionally, for $DYAJOB, I have some work to do on Windows. In order to do so, I have had a Windows 10 VM in my libvirt configuration that I can use. A while ago, Microsoft issued Windows 11. I recently found out that all the components for running Windows 11 inside a libvirt VM are available, and so I set out to upgrade my VM from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This wasn't as easy as I thought, so here's a bit of a writeup of all the things I ran against, and how I fixed them. Windows 11 has a number of hardware requirements that aren't necessary for Windows 10. There are a number of them, but the most important three are: Secure Boot is required (Windows 10 would still boot on a machine without Secure Boot, although buying hardware without at least…  ( 5 min )

Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It's a mix of things that happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren't and there shouldn't be. After two online versions Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference) took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go. Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb, then switching to a final 11h dir…  ( 4 min )

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Kanske något för Spelhelgen™?  ( 6 min )

Covidkur, tok-action och kära återbesök. Hur ser dina spelplaner ut?  ( 6 min )

Vi lirar det uppsnyggade Spidde-spelet.  ( 6 min )

23 augusti är det dags.  ( 6 min )

Brottsbekämpningen börjar klockan 20.  ( 5 min )

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Usla presentationer som dödat hypen för ett spel - berätta vilka du minns.  ( 6 min )

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Den sjätte förseningen vi skriver om i augusti.  ( 6 min )

Gratis som vanligt.  ( 6 min )

Minus 21 miljoner kronor på ett kvartal.  ( 6 min )

För att uppgradera till Unreal Engine 5.  ( 6 min )

16 augusti är det dags att utforska 180 kilometer jaktmark.  ( 6 min )

Men stannar hos företaget.  ( 6 min )

En 13 minuter lång genomgång av platser och fraktioner.  ( 6 min )

Angstronomics reveals the potential specifications for AMD's looming RDNA 3 silicon.  ( 59 min )

Gen 2 X-NAND technology may increase the throughput of our SSDs at no extra cost, according to a California company.  ( 59 min )

Intel develops Tunable Replica Circuit technology to prevent non-invasive physical glitch attacks.  ( 59 min )

A new codename from AMD known as Pink Sardine has emerged in Linux. The codename may correspond to AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000 Phoenix mobile APUs.  ( 59 min )

New laptops from German firm XMG include Ryzen 9 CPUs and external liquid cooling.  ( 63 min )

It clocked at 3.1 GHz but consumed only 17.4W. It is a telltale sign that a volt-mod is behind the impressive 55% overclock compared to the stock 75W Arc A380 graphics card.  ( 59 min )

Dmytro Panin uses a Raspberry Pi Pico to monitor MacBook stats by outputting data to a Pimoroni Pico Display Pack module.  ( 62 min )

AMD's final 96-core EPYC 9654 'Genoa' processors are presumably shipping to the company's partners.  ( 59 min )

Mingda’s Magician Pro is an easy to use printer with a massive build volume.  ( 64 min )

LG brings a new screen shape to the market with its 28-inch DualUp 28MQ780. It’s a 16:18-aspect IPS panel with 2560x2880 pixels, HDR and a wide color gamut. It’s the same as stacking two 21-inch screens vertically, except there’s no line in the middle.  ( 70 min )

Pre-Production BitBlaze Titan notebook based on Russian Baikal-M CPU demonstrated.  ( 60 min )